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Although television, computer games and the Internet play an important role in the lives of children they still also play with physical toys, such as dolls, cars and LEGO bricks. The LEGO company has become the world’s largest toy manufacturer. Our study investigates if the LEGO company’s products have become more violent over time. First, we analyzed the frequency of weapon bricks in LEGO sets. Their use has significantly increased. Second, we empirically investigated the perceived violence in the LEGO product catalogs from the years 1978–2014. Our results show that the violence of the depicted products has increased significantly over time. The LEGO Company’s products are not as innocent as they used to be.

We are running a race with Time; we outstrip the sun, with the round world for the race-course. 1 The implementation of an imperial telegraph network over the course of the late nineteenth century caused a considerable amount of ink to be spilled, in praise, in fear and in confusion. By 1876, with the completion of the trans-Tasman cable between Australia and New Zealand, the British government could communicate with all of its major colonies by electric telegraph. As long as the lines remained intact (this was by no means a certainty), a message could be conveyed from London to Wellington, New Zealand, via the "thunderbolts of Jove". 2 The rapid contraction of time and space that this entailed was much commented upon by contemporaries, who marvelled at the reduction in communication time between England and her antipodes from 3-4 months to a matter of hours. As the most distant colony in the empire, New Zealanders took up the new technology with alacrity: by 1904 New Zealand telegraph traffic ran at twice the rate of any other country in the world, and 5 times the rate in the United States. 3 Although the bulk of these messages merely circuited throughout New Zealand and wider Australasia, it is quite clear that the telegraph was quickly identified as a useful tool of colonisation and nation building.Of course, the growth of the nineteenth century telegraph network captivated people worldwide. It came to symbolise the new power over nature represented by technological modernity. One commentator referred to the wires as "the nerves of the earth" 4 and early biologists like Emil DuBois-Reymond (1818-1896) used the metaphor of telegraph systems to formulate his theory of the human nervous system. 5