Category Archives: Social trends

Over-70s are UK’s most online adults after twentysomethings, survey shows

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ONS data also reveals working mothers spend on average an hour and a quarter more a day on household chores than male partners

You may not catch them on TikTok or Snapchat, but the latest data shows that the over-70s are spending more time online than any generation besides Gen Z.

According to figures from the Office for National Statistics detailing how different Britons report spending their time, the 70-plus age group is second only to those in their 20s when it comes to the average amount of time using a computer or device as a primary activity (separate from working or watching streamed video).

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Huge decline of working class people in the arts reflects fall in wider society

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Study shows the proportion of musicians, writers and artists with working-class origins has shrunk by half since the 1970s

The proportion of working-class actors, musicians and writers has shrunk by half since the 1970s, new research shows.

Analysis of Office for National Statistics data found that 16.4% of creative workers born between 1953 and 1962 had a working-class background, but that had fallen to just 7.9% for those born four decades later.

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Are films really getting longer? We ask the expert

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Sarah Atkinson, professor of screen media, on whether the trend for big, epic films is leading to big, epic runtimes

Zack Snyder’s Justice League: 4hrs 2mins. The Irishman: 3hrs 29mins. The latest James Bond, the longest ever: 2hrs 43mins. Some of the most hyped films of the past few years have been as known for their length as their plot. So is this the new normal – are films getting longer? I asked Sarah Atkinson, professor of screen media at King’s College London.

I loved Tenet, but I remember craving an interval and an ice-cream. Am I the only one feeling films are longer?
Cinema is a bit of a machine, and is surrounded by marketing, so what we hear is often what we remember. These days, there’s a lot of talk about long running times. It’s all part of incentivising people to go out and pay for a ticket, which they won’t do unless it’s for something special – a big, epic film. Just look at the Marvel franchise: almost every one is well over two hours.

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Should I quit my job? We ask the expert

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Tony Wilson, director of the Institute for Employment Studies, on whether the huge rise in vacancies in the UK offers an incentive to look for another job

With the pandemic, workers have been saying “I quit!” in their droves. In the US, employees packed in their jobs at such pace that a new term was coined – the Great Resignation – and alongside it, countless newspaper articles appeared about career-switching. But in the UK, are as many people quitting as we think? And would the greatest new year’s resolution be to join in? I asked Tony Wilson, director of the Institute for Employment Studies.

Is the Great British Resignation under way?
We’ve seen more people resign from their jobs than at any point before: it was roughly 400,000 in the three months from July to September 2021, up from 270,000 in the same period in 2019 – the last non-pandemic year. The UK has a dynamic labour market, with a high turnover, particularly in low-paying work. And when large parts of the economy reopened, more jobs were created.

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Dining across the divide: ‘He’s such a nice guy but supports Brexit. He’s young; it’s not normal’

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Both have experienced being treated as outsiders in the UK, but can they broach one of Britain’s most divisive topics?

Batuhan, 22, Bournemouth

Occupation Support worker and neuropsychology master’s student
Voting record Batuhan is not eligible to vote in the UK. In the last Turkish local government elections, he voted for the centre-left Republican People’s party
Amuse bouche Huge fan of basketball; supports any team LeBron James is playing for

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Dr Sarah Ogilvie: ‘Generation Z are savvy – but I don’t get all their memes’

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The linguist and computer scientist discusses her optimistic assessment of a misunderstood generation – and delves into the nuanced ways to text ‘OK’

Dr Sarah Ogilvie is a linguist, lexicographer and computer scientist at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, who works at the intersection of technology and the humanities. With Roberta Katz, Jane Shaw and Linda Woodhead, she is the author of Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age, which paints an optimistic portrait of a much misunderstood generation that has never known a world without the internet.

Define Gen Zers.
They are people born from the mid-1990s to around 2010. They’re followed by Generation Alpha, who are aged 10 and under, though there’s a bit of an overlap.

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Do long jail sentences stop crime? We ask the expert

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Penelope Gibbs, former magistrate and founder of Transform Justice, on whether harsher sentences are effective

Until recently, the subject of criminal punishment hasn’t been a massive concern for the public (putting aside that small demographic committed to a “hang ’em all!” approach). But in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder, calls for misogyny to become a hate crime have gone from a whisper to a roar. That change would give judges the power to increase sentences when misogyny was found to be an aggravating factor in a crime. But would harsher sentences do much to stop such crimes happening? I asked Penelope Gibbs, former magistrate and founder of Transform Justice, a charity campaigning for a more effective justice system.

Did you hear about the Thai fraudster who was sentenced to jail for more than 13,000 years? I guess they needed a number to describe ‘throwing away the key’. Are long sentences becoming more common?
I don’t know about across the world, but I can tell you that in England and Wales sentences have been getting steadily longer over the past decade, by roughly 20%.

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Dining across the divide: ‘I think some of the ideas are horrible – but it’s nice to sit and talk’

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One is a Belgian resident in the UK, the other was a Ukip candidate: can two strangers find any common ground?

Stijn, 47, Norwich

Occupation Humanitarian aid worker

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Is our planet overpopulated? We ask the expert

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Global development lecturer Heather Alberro on whether rising birth rates are really to blame for the climate crisis

Whether it’s Meghan and Harry limiting themselves to two children, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discussing the “legitimate” concern of parenting through climate catastrophe, the ethical question of whether to add more people to the planet has touched society. But is the world overpopulated in the way we think? I asked Heather Alberro, lecturer in global sustainable development at Nottingham Trent University.

Where did the idea of overpopulation come from?
It started with 19th-century economist Thomas Malthus, who argued that population growth would always outstrip available resources. That’s known as a “Malthusian argument”.

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Dining across the divide: ‘As I get older, I’m more militant. I just think: let’s all glue ourselves to something’

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They disagreed about statues, but not queer fluidity – can two strangers find common ground over dinner?

David, 63, Portsmouth

Occupation Semi-retired primary school teacher
Voting record Labour – years ago because he thought it was essential to do so, now because there’s no one else to vote for
Amuse bouche When he was 10, he won a south London art competition with a painting of a flamenco bar, even though he’d never been to Spain, or a bar, or any flamenco

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People opened up because I’m the Beavis and Butt-head guy’: Mike Judge on his new funk direction

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The writer-director’s comedies – from Office Space to Silicon Valley – always sum up the spirit of their times. So why has he made an LSD-soaked cartoon about George Clinton and Bootsy Collins?

Few writer-directors have been as consistent and ruthless at capturing the moment as Mike Judge, although he never actually intends to do so. “It’s always a shock when something comes out and it feels so relevant,” he says, in his laconic surfer-dude tone, talking to me by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “But I tend to look at stuff that feels as if it’s everywhere, but nobody’s talking about.”

Judge, 57, is so beady at spotting what’s everywhere, his shows themselves end up becoming ubiquitous, the thing everybody’s talking about. It is impossible to imagine 90s TV without his seminal hits, Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, the former satirising the worst of youth culture, the latter fondly depicting gentle American conservatism acclimatising itself to the Bill Clinton era.

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Auteurs assemble! What caused the superhero backlash?

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They’ve conquered the box office. Now it’s payback time. As they are attacked by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, are TV and movie superheroes fighting a losing battle against reality?

Alan Moore’s celebrated 1986 series Watchmen revolved around a conspiracy to kill off masked vigilantes, and in effect that’s what it did in real life. Compared with the complex, mature, literary nature of Watchmen, most other comic-book titles looked juvenile and two-dimensional. This was at a time when “comic-book movies” meant Christopher Reeve’s wholesome Superman series, and when the only inhabitant of the Marvel movie universe was Howard the Duck. The entire industry had to up its game, and a new era of mature “graphic novels” was born.

Now we appear to have come full circle – which is fitting for a story so heavy with clock symbolism. With uncanny timing, HBO’s lavish new Watchmen series arrives at a moment when comic-book movies are again in what you might call a decadent phase of the cycle. They have decisively conquered our screens and our box offices, with ever grander and more improbable forms of spectacle, to the extent that we’re now beginning to question how much more of them we need. Could Watchmen kill off the superheroes once again?

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