Shafer praises a new paper by Adam Thierer on "technopanics":
The beating heart of Thierer’s paper is the belief — which I endorse — that societies tend to twist themselves into moral panics when confronted with something new or unrecognized that they don’t understand. “A moral panic occurs when a segment of society believes that the behavior or moral choices of others within that society poses a significant risk to the society as a whole,” is how one academic quoted by Thierer defines it. The current panics over the Web are just the latest manifestation.
The Dish 