Is social distancing making us rude?
Is social distancing making us rude? I am prompted to write this piece after having heard quite a few anguished anecdotes from close friends, and having suffered a bit personally. But the reports of these mild-mannered folks carried more weight than my own personal experience. People who know me will tell you that I am prone to eliciting incivil behaviour, irrespective of the mode of communication! But then again, maybe I am reading too much into all this, and people around the world are just as cheery online as they ever were. On the other hand, 6 months of forced social isolation cannot be without its side-effects. And then there are the problems inherent to virtual communication. Of mice and men (and women) Research in mice (apparently, they are the go to animals for these sort of studies because they are pretty social) seems to indicate that a few weeks of social deprivation causes them to become depressed, and also show antagonistic social behaviours when co...