Do you think...

[yenrod]

Are people really more violent towards each other now than at any other time in history? Has all our technological progress brought more hate and fear than love and happiness? Usually I'm upbeat and optimistic, but the more I see the news, the more despairing I become.

Or is the other side of the coin ?

Technology isn't causing conflict. It is just making us more aware of problems that we were once blissfully ignorant of. Most people, (even in parts of the world where intense beliefs predominate) are becoming more tolerant and forgiving. It's just that the angry minority are getting noiser!

 

[redfox]

They're certainly getting more coverage in a media short on news and long on time to fill.

 

[ArDee]

I don't think people are more towards each other now than in the past. A couple of years ago I helped Mrs ArDee carry out historical research for part of her studies. This meant reading the local newspapers from the Victorian era approx. 1880 – 1900.

Each week they were full of accounts of murders, fights, riots and gang warfare for the local area, if you compared it to the present local newspapers, society then, in the good old days, appeared a lot more violent than the present day.

I think that you just find out about it more now.

 

[TVC]

I can't see that the planet is any more violent now than at any other time, it's just that it is so much easier and quicker to hear about things. It seems that with camera phones the whole population have become (bad) photo-journalists, Glasgow airport being a fine example.

The 24 hour news presentations are hungry for anything new as they too regularly end up with one journalist interviewing another to fill time, so anything gets airtime so long as there is a grainy image to run.

The depth the news media has sunk to was well demonstrated today when a mother and her two kids were murdered in Manchester. While the police are yet to formally identify the family, Sky news was gleefully refering its viewers to the 'facebook' entry of the dead daughter where you could see a video clip of her singing. So very sad.