This week’s column in The Kerryman newspaper.
Michael Commane
Over the last few weeks there has been talk in the media about the misbehaviour of people in public.
A woman in her mid-80s described on RTE’s Liveline how on a crowded bus no one stood up to offer her a seat. Though dare I, from my own experience, comment that I often see older people behaving in an aggressive and entitled manner.
Some weeks ago journalist Justine McCarthy wrote in her weekly column in The Irish Times on how as a nation being rude is the latest trend in town. She argued that because of automation there is less need for us to engage with one another in our daily lives. How right she is.
When I first saw a self-service checkout in a supermarket I was surprised. Guess what, these days when buying my groceries I head automatically to the self-service checkout. And really that’s something of a contradiction for me.
Automation means we have no verbal interaction with anyone in the shop and today most self-service checkouts don’t accept cash, which means we don’t get to feel, see or touch the money that pays for our purchase.
Most businesses now use automatic telephone answering; it’s even used by pharmacies and GPs.
Again, no real human interaction. And if we have the patience to wait on the phone, three, four, maybe even 10 minutes to speak to a human voice, we are at that stage irritated and frustrated, so it is easy for us to launch into an attack on the unfortunate person with whom we eventually speak.
Last week I called Luas to report a school bag I found at a tram stop. After three attempts and zillions of automated replies I managed to speak to a human voice, but it was not Luas, it was Transport for Ireland.
I discovered in order to get through to any transport company, your call is directed firstly to Transport for Ireland. What nonsense.
It seems it’s not economical for us to talk to real people when we want to engage with most services today. That means we are losing the naturalness and spontaneity in ordinary, everyday conversation.
We are now using phones from dawn to dusk. And that really struck me last week when I saw an adult, presumably a parent, with two young children, talking on the phone and not a word between them and their children.
One day cycling on a busy street in Dublin, half in jest, half seriously, I rang my bell at a man who was walking across the street looking in the other direction. As soon as he saw me he shouted: ‘F-off’.
Last Thursday evening RTE’s Prime Time reported on the dramatic increase in antisocial behaviour across the country. We saw shocking incidences of vandalism. There was a call for more gardaí on our streets, experts were tracing the increasing bad behaviour back to the Covid crisis.
Might it be that because of our great strides in technology we are losing some of the most important characteristics of what it means to be human?
It seems we are constantly on the edge of being frustrated, which can easily lead us to lashing out.
Speak to people with a kind word.
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