Marcus Felson's Routine Activities Theory is that crime is driven by technological changes in society. In the latest version (4th edition) of his book, published in 2010, Felson examines all the things that the Internet can do as a facilitator for crime. But Felson completely fails to examine whether the huge popularity in online activities from Facebook to virtual gaming and time spent in the cyberspace of interactive video games might be responsible for what criminologists describe as the unfathomable drop in crime over the past 15 years.
Mike Sutton's blog on the Best Thinkers website suggests that Felson's Routine Activities Approach in fact predicts that crime should fall if potential offenders and victims are spending several hours a day "routinely" active online or game playing on consoles at home. Sutton asks "Is the RAT in the NET?" He proposes that we need to investigate the possibility of this plausible reason with a "Game Substitution" hypothesis for the crime drop.
Read it here (click)
By Secret Squirrel
1 comments:
Is M Sutton right? Well, he usually is. There is a point there, I spoke to an NCO in 2003 who said 40 yr old TA recruits were beating 20 yr old ones "Playstation generation" as he said. Whatever happened to "Innit"? We need that creature badly.
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