Ideas, inventions and anxieties believed to be new are often much older than their current version.
TV Tropes uses the name for works credited with originating what earlier works had already done. Outside fiction the pattern is familiar: fears that a new medium corrupts the young run back through the panics about novel-reading in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to Socrates's objection to writing in Plato's Phaedrus, and discoveries are routinely named after someone other than their first discoverer.
In practice
- A consultancy launches a management method that repeats one its client's founders tried thirty years earlier.
- A teenager finds a supposedly new slang word in a grandparent's diary.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is small reference pools: people know the famous recent version and not its predecessors. Another is displacement, in which a later version pushes an earlier one out of memory, as a remake can displace the original.
- In its favour
- Consistent with Stigler's law of eponymy and with the history of media panics, which repeat nearly identical complaints about each new medium.
- Against it
- Continuity can be overstated: an older precursor may differ in exactly the ways that matter, and treating every idea as old can dismiss genuine novelty.
- Standing
- Compare newer than they think, its mirror image, and Stigler's law of eponymy.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- The measured patterns of social life