Good manners have shifted over the past generations from “caring for others” to “pleasing ourselves. ” With pleasing ourselves comes a loss of respect for one another and its is a growing problem. People no longer take time to interact with one another due to our fast paced high tech lives. We are not the courteous and thoughtful people we used to be. This research paper will explain how our manners have changed and why. In today’s society email, IM and text messaging is our main source of communication.
This technology is slowly is affecting the way we interact with one another decreasing the amount of time in face-to-face conversation. People text while driving, then flip you off when you beep at them for not paying attention. Then you have the people who talk extra loud on their cell phone in public and they get mad at you when Join into their conversation. If they weren’t talking so loud you wouldn’t have Joined in. Nowadays a simple courtesy smile or hello might go unnoticed because of our inability to look away from the cell phone, lap top or ‘pod.
Making the person who gave the smile or hello feel you were being rude, when you were Just preoccupied. Most of us today are way too concerned with pleasing ourselves to lend a helping hand. Holding a door open for someone used to be a natural gesture, now it’s can be considered a tedious task. People are more worried about how helping someone will affect their own life, will it put them a little behind schedule or somehow make them late for a dinner? What happened to common courtesy and the reward of Just being able to make someone day?
Television also has a big influence on our manners can because the media gives praise to bad behavior and screw ups. Making adults, teens and children think acting rude and obnoxious will earn them popularity amongst friends and peers. When all it really does is make them look and sound foolish. Family talk at the dinner table is being replaced with television. Other rude behavior done at the dinner table is testing or talking on the phone, this is a habit children and teens everywhere are doing and it drives most parent’s crazy. There are many theories about how we as a society let our manners get to this point.
Some experts think parent’s are no longer teaching their children common routers causing them to think it is natural to not say please or thank you. Others think technology is to blame. The truth of the matter is bad mannerism are beginning to have an impact on peoples life in a big way… In 2002 a survey conducted by Public agenda show some shocking statistics about manners. In it, 88 percent of respondents said they often or sometimes came across people who were rude or disrespectful, and 79 percent of them felt that disrespect and lack of courtesy were major problems.
Furthermore, 62 percent said they were bothered a great deal by engine rudeness in public. Those are large numbers, which clearly shows that more than half of Americans are not pleased with the current situation. Another statistic shows 81 percent of the united states admits to testing while driving while another study shows the average child will watch 8,000 murders on TV before finishing elementary school. By age eighteen, the average American has seen 200,000 acts of violence on TV, including 40,000 murders. At a meeting in Nashville, TN last July, Dry.
John Nelson of the American Medical Association (an endorser of National TV-Turnoff Week) said that if 2,888 out of 3,000 studies show that TV violence is a casual factor in real-life mayhem, “it’s a public health problem. ” The American Psychiatric Association addressed this problem in its endorsement of National TV-Turnoff Week, stating, “We have had a long-standing concern with the impact of television on behavior, especially among children. ” Having better manners will not only make you standout in a crowd, but it will make the person receiving your thoughtful gesture feel uplifted.
