For example: Jaws crashed the shark population and Sideways changed the popularity of 2 different Wines.
The 24 hour news cycle. It made the news dependent on ratings and turned into an entertainment medium to fill all of the extra hours. Before that, it was a half hour of local news and a half hour of national news at dinner time and at bedtime with snippets of news in the morning on things like the Today Show. CNN created a format, Fox added imaginary outrage, and things went downhill from there.
How about war of the worlds radio broadcast?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_radio_drama)
Patterson-Gimlin-Film maybe. I see this image everywhere!
A single piece of media, then Neuromancer, but really it’s the entire cyberpunk literary subgenre of the 1980’s and 90’s, including the Cyberpunk TTRPG.
The Hindenburg crash. If it weren’t for the newsreel, it would have been a unique airship crash and the airships would have continued to fly. But because it was shown in every theater as a newsreel for months, the interest in airship travel tanked and fleets were dismantled. It was actually a safe form of travel for the time. While tragic, only 35 people actually died, which is peanuts to a large air liner crash.
I will never forgive them for what they stole from us
Shrek
The book Unsafe at Any Speed was partly responsible for the formation of both the US Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
I’m not claiming to fully understand the cultural impact, but I’ve heard from native Irish folks that Zombie had a material impact on The Troubles.
It’s also a banger.
The first Federal laws against hacking and computer crimes was a direct reaction to the movie War Games (1983).
From Wikipedia:
President Ronald Reagan, a family friend of Lasker’s, watched the film and discussed the plot with members of Congress, his advisers, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Reagan ordered a full national security review. Within a week, the Joint Chiefs of Staff returned an answer: “Yes, the premise was technically possible”. Reagan’s interest in the film is credited with leading to the enactment 18 months later of NSDD-145, the first Presidential directive on computer security.
Metallica held a concert in Russia and two weeks later communism fell.
Sounds like the effect JD Vance had on the Pope
Final Destination caused an entire generation of drivers to abjectly refuse to take up any space within a quarter mile behind a log truck.
I still do this for this exact reason.
I’ve never seen the Final Destination movies, but the one with the tanning bed scene came out when I was in high school.
…Interestingly enough, that was right around when the cliquey “cool” girls stopped going to tanning salons in the winter.
Honestly I got a lot more of that from IdiotsInCars on reddit
That youtube channel is a great way to learn what stupid mistakes drivers commonly make, to know what to look for/avoid.
First thing that came to mind is Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle which led to, among other things, the creation of the FDA.
That wasn’t his goal though; he’s quoted as saying: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
I know, the whole book is about how America is a giant con to get immigrants to come over so they can be exploited for profit then left to die with they can no longer work 12 hour shifts, meanwhile they get to watch their kids get poisoned by companies, ran over by commercial trucks and robbed of any dignity or chance they deserve.
Instead people read it and were like ‘omg some filthy polacks finger could be in my sausage, that’s disgusting!’
Theres still on average about 2 amputations per week across the US meat packaging industry. People are still getting maimed and killed doing a job that pays shit. You just don’t eat as much of them as you used to…
Star Trek introduced a lot of the first concepts of what we currently use as every day technology, it had a first hand tangible impact on the lives of pretty much every human alive today.
I’d probably rank the Bible as having the largest impact. It was both widely disseminated and had a large social impact in a number of areas.
Silent Spring helped kick off a number of environmental policies in the US and elsewhere.
Some of the early science fiction novels had real impact by providing plausible guiding lights for actual scientists about which directions to go in their pursuit of technological advancements. It’s been said that the first step in innovation is imagination, not actual scientific progress.
