• Crime Drop Upon the Creation of the Internet?
    5 replies, posted
Just a quick question, but I listen to a lot of stuff like Secular Talk, and recently mentioned something I've heard before to a friend. Basically, what I've heard is that after the Internet was let loose upon the world, crime took a dramatic drop across the board. The short suggestion I always heard was "access to information and an inexhaustible amount of free porn chilled a lot of people out." When asked to cite this, however, Google is failing me, or I just don't know how to FIND this info. Are they just citing a CORRELATION based upon the events of the time, or is there something harder here?
Even if crime dropped once the internet became widely available, correlation is incredibly iffy. If you want any sort of serious, dependable data as far as this goes, you'd have to consult with a statistician.
Has to be correlation. Pornography has been widely available before the internet in a variety of medium. It really wasn't until recently that streaming has taken root of a lot of formats. You got to remember porn was and still is a huge industry. Porn managed to define some format wars such as Blu-ray vs HD-DVD. There has been a lot of various laws, legislation, and policy changes that influence crime rates. There are a lot of people who research and study why crime and various aspects of it. Very rarely porn is given any credit. If only it was that simple though lol.
The internet also didn't just drop out of nowhere, it slowly gathered momentum over the course of several decades. So even if you could find a correlation between a dropping crime rate and increasing internet usage, there's a lot of time there in which any number of things could have had an effect
didn't the internet just make more ways to break the law?
Internet might very well be a byproduct of what actually is far more likely to have decreased crime, economic growth. Crime is generally (but not always) used as an means to an end. And those ends were for most on the level of survival, being able to feed your family. Seeing as most people poses an intrinsic resistance to commit crimes and now they have the basic necessities to make a life for themselves, they are less likely to show criminal behavior. Those that do still commit crime on a regular basis are the once that do not have access to those basic necessities or the ones that can't accept life without a weekly new pair of Gucci shoes. Naturally I'm glossing over exceptions to this and it's a gross oversimplification.
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