Is technology making us lose our manners?
It's not all chewing with your mouth closed...
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There are many things to be ashamed about when it comes to being British, but - generally speaking - our manners aren’t one of them. That’s not to say that every Brit you meet has good manners (a busy tube commute through London will quickly dispel that myth), but our culture does place a decent amount of stock in certain conducts and courtesies that I find quite endearing.
When I was copywriting for a corporate company, I worked closely with a culture expert who specialised in understanding which cultures worked effortlessly together, and which required more adaptation and care in the workplace. For instance, people from the UK and Japan tended to take more offence at being spoken over or interrupted than those from the USA or the Netherlands.
It was quite fascinating stuff. For instance, in my own experience working with Dutch people, I had often found their communication style overly direct to the point of being rude—they lacked some of that British Politeness that I found comforting. But understanding that no singular culture is “correct” made me realise that, in return, Dutch people probably thought I was full of fluff and pointless niceties. It worked both ways.
Nevertheless, manners are more than just chewing with your mouth closed or holding open a door for someone—they even go beyond the kinds of cultural nuances which we can observe, respect and adapt to. Above all, manners are an indicator of how much we respect our fellow human beings and the world around us. And I’m concerned we’re losing our grip on them.
What’s tech got to do with it?
Last month, OpenAI boss Sam Altman revealed that saying “please” and “thank you” when interacting with ChatGPT was costing the company millions in energy bills. With AI already putting an enormous strain on the planet’s finite resources, it’s enough to make anyone ditch the politeness. But perhaps this is where some of the problem lies.
According to research by the National Library of Medicine, “the type of communication skills learned or practised in technology-mediated communication…may hinder the skills required to decode nonverbal behaviour in face-to-face interactions.” Essentially, the more we interact with tech over people, the more we forget about basic social conduct in real life.
This tallies up with some of the conversations I’ve been having with friends lately. Increasingly, they have experienced instances where people treat their houses like hotels, ditch plans that were in the diary, or stop bothering to ask people how they are or how their day went.
The other day, a friend of mine was left on read after agreeing to meet up with someone over a dating app. They had set a time and place, then…nothing. It doesn’t seem that extraordinary to us now because this behaviour has become commonplace, but technology has allowed us to flush basic manners down the toilet because, well, who is there to call us out anymore? Hinge? ChatGPT? Unlikely.
Back in the day, dates were often the result of set-ups by mutual friends. If the person you agreed to meet up with didn’t show, their poor behaviour would quickly spread to your connections in common, who would inevitably ask why. Or better yet, as my mum recently said to me, “You’d go and knock on their door and ask them what their problem was,” because - shocker - someone would actually know where they lived.
The anonymity of technology has bred a lack of accountability which, paired with a general decline in social conduct, creates a kind of wasteland for good manners. It’s too easy and too common for people to care as they once did. But it’s a risky thing to get complacent about.
Manners are political
At the present time, when misogyny in young men is so profound and hostility towards women and girls is becoming increasingly mainstream, it feels more necessary than ever to prioritise basic manners—to treat all human beings with respect and dignity, whether you want to be romantically involved with them or not.
As a woman, it’s sometimes hard to sift through the difference between someone having generally poor manners and someone not having enough respect for me compared to, say, other men. Similarly, it’s hard not to notice that most of our AI-powered home assistants (like Alexa) are created to sound like women, and are treated incredibly rudely. What one person might put down to a packed schedule or harmless laziness (okay, I didn’t text her back but I was busy and didn’t know her that well anyway, or okay, I’m impolite to my Alexa but she’s not a real woman) might actually be indicative of a wider, slippier slope towards bigotry.
It might sound like a reach to some people, but I don’t think we should overlook the correlation between a decline in manners and the rise of more right-wing ideologies and the Western World’s current war against multiple minority groups.
The old saying goes, “Manners cost nothing”, but, in reality, I think they cost us a lot.
What do you think? Have you noticed a decline in basic human manners? And, if so, what do you think is responsible?
I've had so many conversations on this topic over the past few years, and you've covered it here in such a brilliant way Alanna. I know it's not "real" but I feel so uncomfortable when people tell Siri/Alexa/Google to shut up because that line separating an AI voice will eventually blur and before you know it, you're rudely cutting your loved ones off because they've talked for too long. Loved this piece.
I'm guilty of yelling "google, shut up" a few times after my Google home just randomly starts a long tirade when it was never asked anything in the first place. But I feel bad about it after 😅.
On the cultural aspect it's super interesting to hear about your experience with the Dutch as a British person. I'm French, living in the Netherlands and working quite a lot with British colleagues and I find it more difficult to work with British politeness than Dutch directness. The main thing for me is that I never know if my British colleagues or customers are satisfied. They will say thank you and be nice but then i find out that they are actually not happy 😂. With the Dutch I know what I'm hearing is exactly what they mean.