Worse

We live in remarkable times.  We have remarkable technology all around us.   We carry computing power and communications capabilities in our pockets that would have filled a room when I graduated from college back in the Pleistocene Epoch.   You’d think all that technology would make our society Better.  Well, it’s Top Sites Tuesday #202 – where we get to offer Two Thoughts on just about anything.  My Inner Curmudgeon’s been watching TV commercials again and it looks to him like technology is making us Worse.   Check out, for example, this new commercial by Samsung for its new Galaxy S4 smartphone:

Rude!

Through the miracle of Amazon Prime, my copy of Amy Alkon’s I See Rude People arrived a day early and I haven’t been able to put it down.  I expected a non-stop skewering of the people wildly indifferent to other people that she describes as the new rudeness.  Instead, Alkon offers a sociological reason for the rudeness of our species rooted in a brain whose evolution has not kept up with our societal and technological changes.  She suggests that we have always been a rude and self-centered species but in relatively small social groups (say, tribes) where everyone knew each other, we essentially policed each other.  In our diverse and often anonymous communities, the innate rudeness runs rampant.  Whether you buy her theory or not, her description of the new rudeness, divided into categories like The Mobile Savage, The Underparented Child and The Business of Being Rude, is hilarious.  And, as it says on the cover, Alkon gives you the tools you need to confront these abusers and restore common courtesy … one chastened cellphone user at a time.  For example, she calls back one particularly loud Starbucks cell phone talker who happened to say his phone number, informing him of all the personal information she heard.