> War of The Worlds caused such a sensation when aired on the radio
Today, the majority would dismiss the broadcast as nonsense, but a small, ardent minority would form a distributed, international community around taking it seriously that would then continue on for years and rip apart friendships and families, and potentially have sufficient critical mass to do something stupid.
I feel the difference may be in the stickyness of ideas (across a wider spectrum of merit) and what enables that stickyness.
On the topic of popular scifi, I often think back to this exchange between two characters in Michael Crichton's The Lost World (1997), a bestseller at the time:
"[...] Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species."
- "Yes? Why is that?"
"Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [...]"
When I read this as a young teenager, enthusiastic about scifi and technology and curious about the internet, I dismissed it as cynical and conservative. And of course he got wrong - we don't really lack diversity of thought in the cyberspace age. Instead we managed to create a new kind of cyber-enabled tribalism. Or, maybe, one is a reaction to the other.