Something I Can Believe In
From Internet: Knowledge and Community
- Hoyle Hodges
- Internet: Knowledge and Community
- Response for 26 Jan 2011
- Something I Can Believe In
- The culprit is television.
- (Putnam, The Strange Disappearance of Civic America)
The author has conducted a very detailed study of the reasons for the decline of civic and community engagement in the United States. He uses data from the General Social Survey, the National Opinion Research Center, the Bureau of Census and others to build a comprehensive case for television bringing about the huge decline in community participation by members of society. By laying out the case like a criminal case, he walks through time pressure, economic hard times, residential mobility, suburbanization, women at work, two career families, divorce rates, economic structure changes, the counter culture revolution in the 60’s, growth of the welfare state, civil rights and television and the electronic revolution. By building the “case” he gives examples and graphs that prove his very logical thinking. As an example he uses the Census to prove his point that residential mobility is not the culprit by showing that mobility has remained constant or actually declined. By using straight forward black and white facts Putnam leaves us with television as the main culprit of civic disengagement. While I agree whole heartedly with Putnam’s conclusions, I do not believe he goes far enough into other types of social media and technology. I believe that society is already moving past the television age Satan’s Eye in every living room (Pope Pious). Television and its dominance as a leisure time activity gained enormous traction in the 1950’s long before the Internet and social networking had been invented. As digital technology has become much more common, the Internet has begun to replace the television as the main activity during leisure or free time. The potential is there for a huge return to community and civic actions via digital means. It maybe too soon in our “digital life cycle” to see the trend, but as more and more people connect via the web the spill over into face to face interactions is on the rise. The stereotype of the loner nerd, hunched over a computer playing video games is just that a stereotype, what is actually happening is social media is being used in big and small ways to bring like minded groups of people together for actual action and interaction.
