Hello and welcome to Five Things. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, September

13th, 2023, and this is a special episode of Five Things. Bad behavior in

public on airplanes and theaters at restaurants is on the rise. It seems that

there is at least one such incident plastered all over social media every day.

Has this phenomenon gotten worse since COVID? When did we unlearn how to be

civil to one another? And more importantly, what can we do as a society to fix it? I'm

joined today by author Kirstie Sedgman, a cultural studies scholar based at the

University of Bristol. She also most recently is the author of Unbeing Unreasonable,

a book that attempts to answer these questions. Kirstie, thank you for joining me.

Thank you so much for having me. Okay, so let's start with the evidence. Public

displays of people becoming unhinged, proliferate on social media. My sense and

seeing these videos is that this behavior has gotten worse since COVID. It's

somehow being separated from each other during lockdown made us forget how to

behave when we're together. Do you agree with that? If you'd asked me that

question before COVID, I would have said that it's honestly we've been having

these debates about whether or not people are getting increasingly badly

behaved for, well, over two thousand years as far back as Plato, who was also to

be found complaining about how people who used to be respectful of others suddenly

felt that they could use their tongues and so whatever they liked, particularly in

communal spaces, like theaters, and used to at least be controlled with a stick. So

one sense, this is nothing new. But I work with a range of cultural

organizations and there seems to be a pervasive sense that since COVIDs, things

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