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Simple and likely wrong. Violent crime started falling in the early 1990s, before the internet had much of any penetration outside academia.
by RyanMcGreal 13y ago
Simple and likely wrong. Violent crime started falling in the early 1990s, before the internet had much of any penetration outside academia.
- EGreg 13y agoYou're talking about only the USA. Actually, violent crime spiked in late 80s and then was coming down from that spike in the 90s, so there's that confounding factor. Most of the crime in the late 80s was juvenile crime in fact. It might have had to do with the culture of the time (inner city gangs, etc.) A better way would be to compare what people focus on / use on a daily basis today vs in the 80s. If you are restless today you can pacify yourself with a mobile phone. In fact it's an addiction that gives you a boost of dopamine. And the virtual world is much less .... physical and violent, which reduces people's tendencies over time. Another great pacifier of the 20th century is consumerism. Feel bad? Buy an ikea, veg out in front of the TV. There is a great documentary about how the PR industry was invented and Freud's theories about the "collective ego" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW_rIdd69W8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW_rIdd69W8
- RyanMcGreal 13y agoI'm talking across the industrialized world. The availability of the internet and other 'pacification networks' may be a contributing factor but it's clearly not the driving force.
- EGreg 13y agoWell violence in Britain started to go down a decade later than in the USA, so your time frame counterexample doesn't work for that.
- vacri 13y agoIt could still be the main driving force, and it just so happened that an associated force or two started a little earlier.
- RyanMcGreal 13y agoBut violence has been declining steadily for the past 400 years. Something other than the internet must be behind that.
- EGreg 13y agoNo, it was all the internet! :) But seriously ... I think that, although before it was not the internet, now the internet has accelerated it.
- randomdata 13y agoAnecdotal, but growing up in a generally low-income rural area, I don't remember any of my peers not having a computer in the early 90s. Many of them, including myself, even had computers into the mid-80s and some of those families were quite poor, even by local standards. The internet came later, but games like Doom were huge long before that, which is pertinent as you mention violent crime specifically.
- EGreg 13y agoYeah I am guessing that having computers made people more sendentary and less prone to violent urges etc.