VARIETIES OF COMMUNITIES
I have focused on the physically proximate community through much of the book. We have more sources of identity than just the neighborhood we live in, and thus more communities we belong to. I am a resident of Hyde Park, a neighborhood in Cook County in Chicago, a city in the United States. I have other affiliations also. I am a citizen of India and a professor at the University of Chicago. I am a Tamilian Hindu; I speak English, Hindi, French, and Tamil with varying degrees of fluency; and I am a member of various organizations, both professional ones like the American Finance Association and those with a policy focus like the Group of Thirty. I am a member of various chat groups, including family and college alumni groups. Not only do we have identities that come to the forefront at different times, these identities can imply varying degrees of engagement and support.
Nevertheless, few groups that we identify with engage and support us in the many ways that the ideal proximate local community and its constituents—our family, friends and neighbors, kin, colleagues at work, church, etc.—do. Many of us do not live and work in an ideal local community, though. That is why we look to other communities for our sense of identity. Some find it in religion, others in nationalism, yet others in criminal gangs or extremism. For those without strong ties to a real, grounded, community, these weaker ties to imagined, virtual, or criminal communities may become important sources of identity.
DOES COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY ADD OR SUBTRACT FROM COMMUNITY?
While virtual communities may not substitute satisfactorily for a robust physically proximate community, does information and communications technology weaken community or strengthen it? In general, the evidence seems to be that, if anything, it strengthens it.
For example, the internet and social media clearly allow mass demonstrations to be organized quickly when many people are angry or resentful. The Arab Spring, a series of protests that rolled across the countries of the Middle East starting in late 2010, was a movement that relied on the internet and social media for mobilization. It has been followed by many others—as I write, an impromptu nationwide strike by Brazilian truckers, which has brought the nation to a standstill, was organized on WhatsApp. Technology can create temporary and largely spontaneous mass engagement. It enables easy affiliations and temporary commitments. However, the failure of many of these movements to generate sustained political reforms suggests that organizations of the committed, such as political parties or mobilized communities, are needed to keep people engaged and pushing for real change.
A combination of technology and commitment may work even better. Communications technology can allow a core group of the committed to continue staying in touch with the more loosely affiliated, even when separated by some distance. Technology can offer those on the periphery a greater sense of participation, allowing them to innovate and propose new directions. If the committed channel the energies of the merely affiliated effectively, they can create powerful social or political movements such as the recent #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and assault.2
Nevertheless, the dominant narratives on the advent of new communications technology are that they either turn people inward, making them spend more time on private leisure activities within the home and less on sociable or public activities, or they create a whole new form of distant virtual community, which again detracts from the physically proximate community.3 To examine the validity of these narratives, in the late 1990s researchers Keith Hampton and Andrew Wellman studied a new development in a Toronto suburb. They called it Netville to disguise the actual location.4 Around 60 percent of the homes were wired to high-speed internet with videophones, an online jukebox, online health services, local discussion forums, and a variety of other entertainment and educational applications. Due to some glitch, the rest of the homes were not wired, which gave the researchers an ideal experiment to measure the effects of connectivity.
They found that relative to the residents who had not been connected, the wired residents recognized three times as many neighbors, talked to those neighbors twice as often, made four times as many phone calls to neighbors, and communicated further with them by email. As one member said, “I have noticed a closeness you don’t see in many communities.” Essentially, the local network allowed easy introductions, quick organization of events like barbecues, and rapid response to emergencies like missing pets. The wired net lowered the cost of traversing physical barriers like shut doors.
Indeed, the wired neighbors organized to petition the developer to rectify defects in his construction, and to continue the high-speed access to the network when the trial ended. The developer was forced to acquiesce to their demands to some extent, though not entirely. Consequently, dissatisfied residents successfully petitioned the town to stop him from working on a second development. The researchers concluded that “based on his experience with Netville, the developer acknowledged that he would never build another wired neighborhood.” The network did seem to increase people power in this case, much to the discomfiture of the developer!
The point is that new communications technologies offer opportunities to create, strengthen, and maintain real-world ties. My children keep in much closer contact with their school and college friends and even acquaintances than my generation ever managed to. Technology certainly has the power to strengthen the proximate community.
DOES TECHNOLOGY POLARIZE COMMUNITY?
Another concern seems to be that the new communications technologies tend to polarize communities—given the easy access to diverse opinions, people might dwell on the opinions or websites that most accord with their prejudices, and see their opinions reaffirmed by the comments therein. Therefore, for example, conservatives frequent the Fox News website, which today highlights the spiraling cost of the Mueller investigation into the alleged collusion between President Trump’s campaign and Russia, while liberals turn to the MSNBC website, which headlines the expansion of the Mueller investigation to friends of President Trump’s son-in-law. According to the view that the internet polarizes, few would turn to CNN, which is more middle-of-the-road.
Economists Matt Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro examined whether people are indeed isolating themselves from contrary opinions as they visit the internet.5 They computed an isolation index, which is the difference between the average conservative share of websites visited by self-reported conservatives and the average conservative share of websites visited by self-reported liberals. Therefore, crudely speaking, if conservatives visited only Fox News while liberals visited only MSNBC, the isolation index would be 100; if both visited only CNN, it would be zero. Interestingly, they found the average conservative’s exposure to conservative content was 60.6 percent, similar to a person who gets all her news from usatoday.com. The average liberal’s exposure was 53.1 percent, similar to a person who gets all her news from cnn.com. The isolation index for the internet was thus only 7.5 percentage points. Contrary to popular belief, if a consumer did indeed get news exclusively from Fox News, she would consume news more conservatively than 99 percent of internet news users.
The reasons are interesting. Most online news is obtained from relatively centrist news sites. Moreover, most consumers who tend to view politically extreme websites tend to be consumers of a variety of websites, and visit the opposite extremes also (some perhaps to reinforce their opinion of how depraved the other side is). Indeed, people are more eclectic in their choice of which websites to visit than in their choice of residential neighborhood or their friends. The authors report the isolation index for neighborhoods to be 18.7 percent, and for friends to be 30.3 percent. We choose to live in neighborhoods that think more like us, and to have friends who are especially likely to share our opinions. Indeed, for most people, access to the new communications technologies may broaden, rather than narrow, their sources of news and opinion.
Gentzkow and Shapiro conducted their study before the rise of the Tea Party and way b
efore the polarizing 2016 election in the United States, so behavior may have changed. Moreover, internet users may be younger and more flexible. The elderly may prefer TV and may switch channels less. Nevertheless, their study does suggest the effects of technology may not be so straightforward as sometimes postulated. Moreover, as with any new media, the establishment is now getting to understand it better, and putting in filters to screen out its worst social effects.
CAVEATS?
There are at least two possible additional caveats to a view that technology enables stronger, more broadly informed proximate communities. First, technology is improving and becoming more immersive, luring those who are vulnerable to its charms away from the real world. My colleague Erik Hurst, along with others, notes a decline in the United States of market hours worked by young men in the age group of twenty-one to thirty of about 203 hours per year over the period 2000–2015.6 Fully 15 percent of these young men did not work at all in 2015, compared to 8 percent in 2000. The declines in hours worked started before the Great Recession, accelerated during it, and have tapered somewhat since. The declines are more precipitous than for older men in the age group of thirty-one to fifty-five. Hurst and his coauthors argue that part of the explanation is that young men are spending more time in gaming and computer leisure use—around 99 hours more per year, on average.
It is hard to conclude from this study, though, that gaming is socially damaging. While young men do seem to spend more time online at the expense of paid work, they seem happy with their choice, and are spending more time at home (perhaps to the discomfiture of their parents). They also did not reduce the amount of time they spent socializing. In sum, while they might work less, there are some compensations. Indeed, to the extent it keeps some of them off the street and socially destructive activities, it may even be beneficial.
More generally, dire predictions of the demise of community engagement as technology offers more entertainment choices may be overstated. For instance, Robert Putnam argued in his influential book Bowling Alone that civic association in the United States has been declining since the 1970s, in significant part due to the advent of television, but also because of the decline in civic consciousness since the generations that came of age before World War II. Putnam pointed to the decline in the number of bowling leagues, among other indicators, to demonstrate the decline in engagement. However, as Princeton historian Daniel Rodgers asserts, “. . . other associations held their own or flourished. Volunteering rates among teenagers rose, megachurches boomed, and advocacy groups of all sorts grew dramatically . . . the agencies of socialization were different from before, but they were not discernibly weaker.”7 In sum, we do not have strong evidence that information and communications technology makes it hard for the proximate community to engage, though we have to be vigilant about the possibility.
The second caveat is that while technology may not increase polarization, it can allow extreme elements in society to find one another and organize. A number of impressionable youth have been converted to Jihadist ways over the internet, and drawn into committing terrorist acts. Similarly, incels or involuntary celibates are an online subculture that consists of men unable to find a romantic or sexual partner. They have spurred one another on through the internet to commit a number of mass murders in North America, particularly of women. In various emerging markets, lynch mobs have been provoked by inflammatory messages to commit murders. The internet and social media are not always beneficial for the civilized community. Nevertheless, the balance of evidence seems to be that ties in the proximate community have not been weakened, and may even have been strengthened, by the direct effects of communications technology.
REVIVING THE PROXIMATE COMMUNITY
At the same time, we do know that enhanced trade and technological change transmitted through markets have led to the loss of middle-income jobs and weakened the economic basis for the community in many parts of the developed world. It may be this, coupled with the flight of those who can leave, that is more responsible for the social disintegration of the community.
How do we revive the proximate community? There is no magic solution to creating local jobs, but as one examines case studies of what has worked, some key factors emerge. Once again, we will see the importance of technology as part of the solution. Let us start with two case studies. First, let’s look at a project that revived community spirit, and in the process made the community more attractive and livable. It took place in Indore in India.
CLEANING UP INDORE
Indian cities are colorful, vibrant, noisy, and . . . dirty. The commercial hub of the state of Madhya Pradesh, Indore, was no exception.8 People treated it as a vast public garbage dump. After eating food on paper plates bought from stalls at the famous Sarafa food market, customers simply threw their plates and any residue on the ground. People were no more careful with their domestic garbage, dumping it anywhere in the proximity of overflowing dumpsters, which were rarely emptied. Stray animals—dogs, cows, goats, and pigs—roamed freely, eating the garbage and adding their excrement to the mix. Some poor people, who did not have access to toilets, defecated in the open, in vacant fields or near public drains. All in all, it was a perfect breeding place for flies, mosquitoes, and, therefore, disease.
Into this mix were thrown two abnormal individuals, Malini Gaud, who had been elected mayor of Indore on a plank of cleanliness, and Manish Singh, the municipal commissioner. There was also one dedicated NGO, Basix, which had experience in effective waste management. Basix wanted more waste for poor rag pickers, who make a living separating out metals, paper, plastic, and glass from waste, and recycling it. The reformers realized that part of the solution was to make it easier for people to dispose of their garbage. That meant placing public garbage cans at every needed place throughout the city with its location geo-tagged for easy collection, collecting domestic garbage directly from every home, and constructing over ten thousand toilets in places where people used open spaces.
The municipal cleaning staff now had to collect the garbage. The 5,500-person staff was used to collecting pay and not much more. Attendance was a miserable 30 to 40 percent. The municipal commissioner decided to apply both carrot and stick. Staff were given smart uniforms, and their cycle rickshaws replaced with motorized GPS-fitted trucks. Each vehicle was given about one thousand households or bins to collect from every day, and its location and performance was monitored. Most employees actually were unhappy with their poor image. They did want to do a good job once they realized the mayor and commissioner were serious about change and apathy would no longer be the order of the day. Some did not want to change, and the stick was applied to them. Biometric attendance was introduced, and after discussion with the union and due notice, three hundred still-recalcitrant employees were suspended, and six hundred were terminated.
The householder was happy that garbage was collected regularly at her doorstep, and soon agreed to pay a regular monthly fee for collection, offsetting the municipality’s additional costs. Shops and eateries installed garbage cans outside, incentivized by a stiff fine if they lacked one. One knotty problem was that some people still preferred answering the call of nature in the open rather than in an enclosed toilet. The municipality adopted the innovative idea of drum squads—these would search stealthily for open defecators and then flush them out by drumming loudly when they were found. Open defecation ceased, and disease seems to have fallen significantly since.
Cleaning up a city seems small in the larger scheme of community revival, but it is an essential component of change, especially in a world where the ability to attract talented people with improved livability is an important source of competitive advantage. Moreover, it offers a very visible sign of community effort and engagement. According to Indian magazine Business Today, there is something strange about the Sarafa market today: “There is no leftover food, no dirty plates, no garbage to be seen—anywhere.” Indore was ranked the cleanest
city in India in 2017 (after coming in at 149th in 2014). Its citizens take pride in its ranking and, according to Vijay Mahajan, the chairman of Basix, are working hard to maintain it.
REINVENTING GALENA
Consider our second example of community revival, this time in a developed country. The population of Galena, Illinois, rivaled that of Chicago in the nineteenth century. Galena witnessed one of America’s first mineral rushes as it had extensive deposits of lead sulfide, but the town declined steadily into the twentieth century as the demand for lead slowed and the Galena River became more difficult to use because of erosion. The population fell steadily from the 1950s until an enterprising mayor in the 1980s, Frank Einsweiler, decided to emphasize its tourist attractions. The boarded-up old houses on Main Street were refurbished—and a seedy downtown became a charming nineteenth-century vintage attraction virtually overnight. Soon a variety of restaurants and retailers of handicrafts, as well as purveyors of luxury goods, opened on and around Main Street, adding to tourist interest and local jobs.
The town also emphasized its links with the famous Union Civil War general and United States president Ulysses S. Grant, who worked in his family tannery and leather-goods shop in Galena before leaving for the war. On his victorious return in 1865, he was presented a brick house, which is now an important historical attraction in Galena.
The Third Pillar Page 41