BOWLING ALONE
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Strikingly, protests and demonstrations are not an alternative to conventional politics, but a complement, in the sense that protesters are unusually active politically in more ordinary ways, too. Even though participation in demonstrations and forms of civil disobedience is not much more common nowadays than in the sixties, it is more widely seen as legitimate by nonparticipants. These days “movement-type” political actions are accepted as “standard operating procedure” across the political spectrum, unlike three or four decades ago. On the other hand, actual involvement is limited to a small and aging fraction of the population. Moreover, as we noted in chapter 2, petitioning and participation at local public meetings have slumped over the last decade or two. As David Meyer and Sidney Tarrow, proponents of the “movement society” hypothesis, ultimately concede, “The amount of highly contentious forms accepted and actually used by citizens seems to be more circumscribed than it was two decades ago.”71
Figure 45: The Graying of Protest Demonstrations
The decline of grassroots protest should not be exaggerated. The 1990s saw much activity by gay and lesbian activists and pro-lifers, as well as a steady low level of local and campus activism. Grassroots social protest may well be as common today as during the 1960s and 1970s, and tolerance for such protest is clearly up. However, I know of no evidence that actual participation in grass-roots social movements has grown in the past few decades to offset the massive declines in more conventional forms of social and political participation.
TELECOMMUNICATIONS CONSTITUTES the third countertrend toward greater social connectedness considered in this chapter, and by all odds it is the most important. The humble telephone provides one instructive example. Throughout the twentieth century telephone use grew exponentially. As the first half of figure 46 shows, the diffusion of phones into American homes followed a familiar trajectory—rising steadily for the first two-thirds of the century, except for the Great Depression reversal. Between 1945 and 1998 local calls per capita climbed from 304 to 2,023 annually, while annual long-distance calls per capita exploded from 13 to 353. Most of this growth represented business and commercial communication, but purely social calls also increased. By 1982 almost half of all American adults talked on the phone (locally or long-distance) with friends or relatives virtually every day. Ties among distant friends and relatives were transformed from the written to the spoken word over the last quarter of the century, as the second half of figure 46 shows, accelerating after the deregulation of the long-distance telephone industry in 1984 before apparently leveling off in the 1990s. The rapid pace of technological innovation—especially the diffusion of cell phones in the 1990s—continued to make the telephone nearly ubiquitous. By 1998 the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press reported that two-thirds of all adults had called a friend or relative the previous day “just to talk.”72
For nearly half a century after its invention in 1876 the telephone’s social implications were badly misjudged by analysts and even by the phone company itself. For those of us who wish to anticipate the impact of the Internet on social relations, the astounding series of poor predictions about the social consequences of the telephone is a deeply cautionary tale. Alexander Graham Bell himself originally expected the telephone to serve the sort of broadcasting function that would later become the province of radio—“music on tap.” Well into the twentieth century telephone executives were so convinced that their primary customer was the businessman that they actually discouraged “socializing” by telephone. As Claude Fischer, the leading sociologist of the telephone, summarizes, “[F]or a generation or more there was a mismatch between the ways people actually used the telephone and how industry men imagined it would or should be used.”73
Even with the benefit of hindsight it is surprisingly difficult to evaluate the effects of the telephone on social relations. Ithiel de Sola Pool, a pioneer in this field, observed:
Figure 46a: The Telephone Penetrates American Households
Figure 46b: Trends in Long-Distance Personal Phone Calls and Letters
Wherever we look, the telephone seems to have effects in diametrically opposite directions. It saves physicians from making house-calls, but physicians initially believed it increased them, for patients could summon the doctor to them rather than travel to him…. It allows dispersal of centers of authority, but it also allows tight continuous supervision of field offices from the center…. No matter what hypothesis one begins with, reverse tendencies also appear.74
Socially speaking, the telephone both gives and takes away. When a fire in a switching center unexpectedly cut telephone service on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for three weeks in 1975, two-thirds of the people who lost service reported that being without a telephone made them feel isolated, but one-third reported that they visited other people in person more frequently. In other words, the telephone appears to reduce both loneliness and face-to-face socializing.75
Many observers have theorized that the telephone fostered “psychological neighborhoods,” liberating our intimate social networks from the constraints of physical space. As early as 1891 one telephone official suggested that the technology would bring an “epoch of neighborship without propinquity.” In fact, however, the first comprehensive study of the social impact of the telephone (in 1933) found that this point-to-point medium (unlike the mass media) reinforced existing local ties more than distant ones. In the mid-1970s phone company records were said to show that between 40 and 50 percent of all phone calls originating from a household were made within a two-mile radius, and 70 percent were made within a five-mile radius. Roughly 20 percent of all residential calls were made to a single number, and roughly half were made to one of only five numbers. Concludes Martin Mayer, summarizing these data, “People make most of their telephone calls within the neighborhood in which they live.” The type of household that makes heaviest use of the telephone, Mayer reports, is a family with teenagers that has recently moved to a new neighborhood in the same metropolitan area—in other words, the telephone is used to maintain personal relationships now severed by space. “One does not meet new friends on the telephone.”76
Thus, somewhat paradoxically, the telephone seems to have had the effect of reinforcing, not transforming or replacing, existing personal networks. Compare the top half of figure 46 on the diffusion of the telephone in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century with any of our earlier charts of community engagement over this same period, and the conclusion is obvious: At least in those years, telecommunications and conventional forms of social connectedness were complements, not alternatives. Similarly, Claude Fischer’s historical analysis of the social impact of the telephone concludes that although the telephone vastly expanded the possibilities for personal communication, it “did not radically alter American ways of life. Rather, Americans used it to more vigorously pursue their characteristic ways of life.”
The adoption of the telephone probably led people to hold more frequent personal conversations with friends and kin than had previously been customary, even if it also led them to curtail some visits. …In total, calling probably led to more social conversations with more people than before. Perhaps these calls substituted for longer visits or chats with family members, or perhaps they simply took up time that would have been spent alone.
The telephone appears to be implicated more in another trend, that of increasing privatism… the participation in and valuation of private social worlds as opposed to the larger, public community…. There is little evidence that the telephone enabled people to become involved in distinctively new organizational commitments…. The home telephone allowed subscribers to maintain more frequent contact with kin and friends by chatting briefly perhaps a few times a week instead of at greater length once a week. There is little sign that telephone calling opened up new social contacts.77
In sum, the telephone has without doubt facilitated schmoozing with old friends, and in that sense it has offset some of the disconnection
described in chapter 6. On the other hand, it has not engendered new friendships, nor has it substantially altered the characteristic activities of machers. Historian Daniel Boorstin summarizes the surprisingly mundane impact of the phone on Americans’ social capital: “The telephone was only a convenience, permitting Americans to do more casually and with less effort what they had already been doing before.”78
As the twenty-first century opens we are only a few years into the era of widespread access to the Internet, yet it is hard to avoid speculating that the implications of this new technology of communication may dwarf the effects of the telephone on American society. The speed of diffusion of this new technology has been substantially greater than that of almost any other consumer technology in history—rivaled only by television. To go from 1 percent market penetration to 75 percent required nearly seven decades for the telephone; for Internet access the equivalent passage will require little more than seven years. One survey organization reported that nearly one-third of the adult population (about sixty-four million people) had used the Internet as of the spring of 1999, up by more than ten million users from barely six months earlier.79
Like virtually all technical consumer innovations, this one caught on most rapidly and fully among younger generations. One study in 1999 found that although young people were in general much less likely to seek out political information than older cohorts, they were more likely to use the Internet as their preferred means of access. On the other hand, at about the same time the Web site of the American Association of Retired Persons reportedly was already receiving half a million individual visitors every month.80 The new medium drew, as if mesmerized, people of all generations.
Within a few years of the Internet’s launch, simulacra of most classic forms of social connectedness and civic engagement could be found on-line. Mourners could attend virtual funerals over the Web; a reporter for Today in Funeral Service told the Associated Press that the on-line funeral “kind of de-personalizes it, but it’s better than missing it.” Virtual vows arrived; America Online in June 1997 held the largest cyberwedding to date, marrying thousands of couples simultaneously while spectators “watched” and “cheered” from their virtual pews. At last count Yahoo mentioned more than five hundred places where one could pray virtually, including one—Yaale Ve’Yavo, an Orthodox Jewish site—that forwards e-mail prayers to Jerusalem to be affixed to the Western Wall. Easter services and Passover seders; grief counseling and cancer support groups; volunteering, cyberromance, and hundreds of thousands of chat groups; voting, lobbying, and even an AIDS Action Council “virtual march on Washington” that logged over twenty-three thousand “poster-carrying marchers”—all these forms of virtual social capital and more could be found in cyberspace.81
One central question, of course, is whether “virtual social capital” is itself a contradiction in terms. There is no easy answer. The early, deeply flawed conjectures about the social implications of the telephone warn us that our own equally early conjectures about the Internet are likely to be similarly flawed. Very few things can yet be said with any confidence about the connection between social capital and Internet technology. One truism, however, is this: The timing of the Internet explosion means that it cannot possibly be causally linked to the crumbling of social connectedness described in previous chapters. Voting, giving, trusting, meeting, visiting, and so on had all begun to decline while Bill Gates was still in grade school. By the time that the Internet reached 10 percent of American adults in 1996, the nationwide decline in social connectedness and civic engagement had been under way for at least a quarter of a century. Whatever the future implications of the Internet, social intercourse over the last several decades of the twentieth century was not simply displaced from physical space to cyberspace. The Internet may be part of the solution to our civic problem, or it may exacerbate it, but the cyberrevolution was not the cause.
We also know that early users of Internet technology were no less (and no more) civically engaged than anyone else. By 1999 three independent studies (including my own) had confirmed that once we control for the higher educational levels of Internet users, they are indistinguishable from nonusers when it comes to civic engagement.82 On the other hand, these oft ballyhooed results prove little about the effects of the Net, because of the likelihood that Internet users are self-selected in relevant ways. The absence of any correlation between Internet usage and civic engagement could mean that the Internet attracts reclusive nerds and energizes them, but it could also mean that the Net disproportionately attracts civic dynamos and sedates them. In any event, it is much too early to assess the long-run social effects of the Internet empirically. Hence I consider here some of the potential advantages and disadvantages of computer-mediated communication for American civic life, recognizing in advance that neither the apocalyptic “gloom and doom” prognosticators nor the utopian “brave new virtual community” advocates are probably on target. How are “virtual” communities likely to be different from the “real” thing?
Community, communion, and communication are intimately as well as etymologically related. Communication is a fundamental prerequisite for social and emotional connections. Telecommunications in general and the Internet in particular substantially enhance our ability to communicate; thus it seems reasonable to assume that their net effect will be to enhance community, perhaps even dramatically. Social capital is about networks, and the Net is the network to end all networks. By removing barriers of time and distance, students of computer-mediated communication like sociologist Barry Wellman maintain, “Computer-supported social networks sustain strong, intermediate, and weak ties that provide information and social support in both specialized and broadly based relationships. …Computer-mediated communication accelerates the ways in which people operate at the centers of partial, personal communities, switching rapidly and frequently between groups of ties.”83
Very much like nineteenth-century futurists contemplating the vistas opened by the telephone, enthusiasts for “virtual community” see computer networks as the basis for a kind of utopian communitarianism. Starr Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff, early prophets of computer-mediated communication, predicted that “we will become the Network Nation, exchanging vast amounts of both information and socioemotional communications with colleagues, friends and ‘strangers,’ who share similar interests … we will become a ‘global village.’” Internet theorist Michael Strangelove wrote:
The Internet is not about technology, it is not about information, it is about communication—people talking with each other, people exchanging e-mail…. The Internet is mass participation in fully bidirectional, uncensored mass communication. Communication is the basis, the foundation, the radical ground and root upon which all community stands, grows, and thrives. The Internet is a community of chronic communicators.84
Howard Rheingold, self-described “homesteader on the electronic frontier,” reported, “The idea of a community accessible only via my computer screen sounded cold to me at first, but I learned quickly that people can feel passionately about e-mail and computer conferences. I’ve become one of them. I care about these people I met through my computer.” John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, found no parallel in recorded history for the advent of computer-mediated communication: “We are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire.”85
The Internet is a powerful tool for the transmission of information among physically distant people. The tougher question is whether that flow of information itself fosters social capital and genuine community. Information is, of course, important, but as John Seeley Brown and Paul Duguid of Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center emphasize, information itself needs a social context to be meaningful: “The tight focus on information, with the implicit assumption that if we look after information everything else will fall into place, is ultimately a sort of social and moral blindness.” At its best, computer-mediated c
ommunication allows wider, more efficient networks that strengthen our ties to the social world and increase our “intellectual capital,” for information can be shared at virtually no cost. People with different pieces of the puzzle can collaborate more easily. Computer-mediated communication can support large, dense, yet fluid groups that cut across existing organizational and geographic boundaries, increasing the involvement of otherwise peripheral participants, such as the recent retirees studied in one corporate experiment in electronic communication.86
Social networks based on computer-mediated communication can be organized by shared interests rather than by shared space. By century’s end thousands of far-flung, functionally defined networks had sprung up, linking like-minded people as disparate as BMW fanciers, bird-watchers, and white supremacists. Echoing precisely (but perhaps unconsciously) early speculations about the effects of the telephone, MIT computer scientist Michael L. Dertouzos speculated about millions of “virtual neighborhoods” based on shared avocations rather than shared space.87 Certainly cyberspace already hosts thousands of hobby and other special interest groups, and if participation in such groups becomes widespread and durable, then perhaps the prediction may be right this time.