British columnist Michael Deacon is worried about the state of common courtesy around the world today. “More and more last year,” he writes in a Telegraph article, ”it seemed that many of us thought it our right to offend or inconvenience others. We considered consideration beneath us.”

Take for example, individuals who continue conversing on their cell phones while checking out at a store; seated subway riders who seem oblivious to the senior citizen standing next to them the entire trip; or web users who think nothing of posting insulting comments on blogs and other Internet pages. But how did culture become so discourteous? Deacon says technology is largely to blame for bringing us “innumerable new opportunities to be rude.”

However, these new means of communication have succeeded in achieving one thing: they have given us the impression that we are entitled to get whatever we want, as quickly as we want it. Listen to music, check your emails, make some telephone calls – whenever and wherever you like. Being spoilt in this way means that, when we find ourselves experiencing the least inconvenience, we feel affronted, as if our rights were being trampled on.

A long queue at the cash machine, being kept on hold when telephoning the bank, waiting more than 10 seconds to cross a busy road – it’s almost a reflex, these days, to take such trifles personally. A phenomenon of the Nineties was road rage. Today, I’m sure that more and more of us feel pavement rage. There are too many people and they’re in our way.

But Deacon says what is perhaps most disturbing is that people no longer seem ashamed of rudeness, which nowadays is almost applauded on TV reality shows and sitcoms. So before matters get any worse, Deacon has a challenge for the world: “This New Year we should try to make common courtesy rather more common.” Agreed?