This weekend column is brought to you by the founders of Niceties Tokens, Liz and Pete of Team Nice.

20. Kids Today

I discovered this conversation on Fridaycities – the London social network site (if you want to join it you might need this code: pfpxc3ogqu5). They were discussing why people think that so many kids are stabbing each other.

A few different points were made about this, one being that knife crime and youth crime have always been there – it’s just that it’s in fashion to write about it in the media at the moment.

Someone quoted a very telling paragraph from a psychology book:

In North America, survey evidence suggests that people believe murder is more common than suicide, although statistically suicide is nearly 50 per cent more prevalent. If we think about how murder and suicide are reported in the press, then it’s not too difficult to see that people may be able to recall more examples of murder than of suicide.

As we all know, newspapers and television media are a massive influence throughout our society. But then since the blessed ‘new media’ age began, communication between each other suddenly became so much easier. We all have so much more access to information and other people’s opinions that the poor newspapers are less and less of an influence. They can still provide the news, but we have so much information available to us that we are all making up our own minds, and then discussing it more with more and more people.

Every day it becomes more apparent that we should be the influence on our society – not our newspapers… I swear I reckon we are on the verge of some really weird revolution.

This weeks niceness…
I thought it would be nice to send some anonymous pleasantries to postal workers. I’ve been putting them in different post boxes…

By Liz Akers