Having explored both optimistic and pessimistic scenarios, what can we conclude about the probable effects of telecommunications on social connectedness and civic engagement? The history of the telephone reminds us that both utopianism and jeremiads are very likely misplaced. Moreover, it is a fundamental mistake to suppose that the question before us is computer-mediated communication versus face-to-face interaction. Both the history of the telephone and the early evidence on Internet usage strongly suggest that computer-mediated communication will turn out to complement, not replace, face-to-face communities.
In a particularly striking parallel to the use of the telephone, a careful study by sociologist Barry Wellman and his colleagues of the use of computer-mediated communication by research scholars found that
although the Internet helps scholars to maintain ties over great distances, physical proximity still matters. Those scholars who see each other often or work nearer to each other email each other more often. Frequent contact on the Internet is a complement to frequent face-to-face contact, not a substitute for it.105
This finding is wholly consistent with the informed prediction by MIT researcher Dertouzos, an enthusiastic champion of computer-mediated communication: “[T]hough some unimportant business relationships and casual social relationships will be established and maintained on a purely virtual basis, physical proximity will be needed to cement and reinforce the more important professional and social encounters.” “Dan Huttenlocher, professor of computer science at Cornell, argues that digital technologies are adept at maintaining communities already formed. They are less good at making them.”106 If the primary effect of computer-mediated communication is to reinforce rather than replace face-to-face relationships, however, then the Net is unlikely in itself to reverse the deterioration of our social capital.
Finally, we must not assume that the future of the Internet will be determined by some mindless, external “technological imperative.” The most important question is not what the Internet will do to us, but what we will do with it. How can we use the enormous potential of computer-mediated communication to make our investments in social capital more productive? How can we harness this promising technology for thickening community ties? How can we develop the technology to enhance social presence, social feedback, and social cues? How can we use the prospect of fast, cheap communication to enhance the now fraying fabric of our real communities, instead of being seduced by the mirage of some otherworldly “virtual community”? In short, how can we make the Internet a part of the solution? As the new century opens, some of the most exciting work in the field of computer-mediated communication is addressing precisely these issues. In the final chapter of this book, I shall say a bit about some of those prospects. For the moment, I conclude that the Internet will not automatically offset the decline in more conventional forms of social capital, but that it has that potential. In fact, it is hard to imagine solving our contemporary civic dilemmas without computer-mediated communication.
The evidence on small groups, social movements, and telecommunications is more ambiguous than the evidence in earlier chapters. All things considered, the clearest exceptions to the trend toward civic disengagement are 1) the rise in youth volunteering discussed in chapter 7; 2) the growth of telecommunication, particularly the Internet; 3) the vigorous growth of grassroots activity among evangelical conservatives; and 4) the increase in self-help support groups. These diverse countercurrents are a valuable reminder that society evolves in multiple ways simultaneously. These exceptions to the generally depressing story I have recounted alert us to a heartening potential for civic renewal. Even so, these developments hardly outweigh the many other ways in which most Americans are less connected to our communities than we were two or three decades ago. Before exploring possible avenues for reform, we need to understand the origins of that ebb tide. What can explain the reversal in recent decades of the civic-minded trends that characterized the first two-thirds of the twentieth century? We turn to that conundrum in the next section of this book.
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SECTION THREE
Why?
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CHAPTER 10
Introduction
SOMETHING IMPORTANT HAPPENED to social bonds and civic engagement in America over the last third of the twentieth century. Before exploring why, let’s summarize what we have learned.
During the first two-thirds of the century Americans took a more and more active role in the social and political life of their communities—in churches and union halls, in bowling alleys and clubrooms, around committee tables and card tables and dinner tables. Year by year we gave more generously to charity, we pitched in more often on community projects, and (insofar as we can still find reliable evidence) we behaved in an increasingly trustworthy way toward one another. Then, mysteriously and more or less simultaneously, we began to do all those things less often.
We are still more civically engaged than citizens in many other countries, but compared with our own recent past, we are less connected. We remain interested and critical spectators of the public scene. We kibitz, but we don’t play. We maintain a facade of formal affiliation, but we rarely show up. We have invented new ways of expressing our demands that demand less of us. We are less likely to turn out for collective deliberation—whether in the voting booth or the meeting hall—and when we do, we find that discouragingly few of our friends and neighbors have shown up. We are less generous with our money and (with the important exception of senior citizens) with our time, and we are less likely to give strangers the benefit of the doubt. They, of course, return the favor.
Not all social networks have atrophied. Thin, single-stranded, surf-by interactions are gradually replacing dense, multistranded, well-exercised bonds. More of our social connectedness is one shot, special purpose, and self oriented. As sociologist Morris Janowitz foresaw several decades ago, we have developed “communities of limited liability,” or what sociologists Claude Fischer, Robert Jackson, and their colleagues describe more hopefully as “personal communities.”1 Large groups with local chapters, long histories, multiple objectives, and diverse constituencies are being replaced by more evanescent, single-purpose organizations, smaller groups that “reflect the fluidity of our lives by allowing us to bond easily but to break our attachments with equivalent ease.”2 Grassroots groups that once brought us face-to-face with our neighbors, the agreeable and disagreeable alike, are overshadowed by the vertiginous rise of staff-led interest groups purpose built to represent our narrower selves. Place-based social capital is being supplanted by function-based social capital. We are withdrawing from those networks of reciprocity that once constituted our communities.
Most puzzling, unlike the declines of community that earlier Jeremiahs thought they discerned, this erosion of social capital did not begin when the Pilgrims first stepped ashore. On the contrary, within living memory the tide was strongly moving in the opposite direction—toward more active social and political participation, more fulsome generosity and trustfulness, greater connectedness. Whatever one’s detailed assessment of the reversal of tide in the last two or three decades, its very suddenness, thoroughness, and unexpectedness constitute an intriguing mystery. Why, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s, did the fabric of American community life begin to unravel? Before we can consider reweaving the fabric, we need to address this mystery.
It is, if I am right, a puzzle of some importance to the future of American democracy. It is a classic brainteaser, with a corpus delicti, a crime scene strewn with clues, and many potential suspects. As in all good detective stories, however, some plausible miscreants turn out to have impeccable alibis, and some important clues hint at portentous developments that occurred long before the curtain rose. Moreover, as in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, this crime turns out to have had more than one perpetrator, so that we shall need to sort out ringleaders from accomplices. Finally, I need to make clear at
the outset that I have not entirely solved the mystery, so I invite your help in sifting clues.
WHEN SEEKING TO SOLVE a serial crime (or, for that matter, to understand a public health epidemic) investigators typically look for common features among the victims—were they all blondes, or seafood aficionados, or left-handed? Similarly, social scientists, faced with a trend like declining social participation, look for concentrations of effects. If the drop in participation is greatest among suburbanites, that might suggest one explanation, whereas if it is greatest among (say) working women, another interpretation becomes more plausible. I too shall follow that broad strategy, looking to see whether the declines in civic engagement are correlated across time and space with certain social characteristics. We must recognize at the outset, however, two weaknesses in this strategy.
First, effects triggered by social change often spread well beyond the point of initial contact. If, for example, the dinner party has been undermined by the movement of women into the paid labor force—and we shall find some evidence for that view—such a development might well inhibit dinner parties not only among women who work outside the home, but also among stay-at-homes, tired of doing all the inviting. In that event, work and dinner parties might be only loosely correlated across individuals, even though (by hypothesis) the former had undermined the latter. Similarly, if commuting or TV triggered the collapse of fraternal clubs, the effects would eventually be visible among noncommuters and non–TV watchers, since once the club started downhill, even those otherwise ready to show up wouldn’t. We saw in earlier chapters evidence of just such “synergistic” effects, such as the more rapid decline in collective activities (like public meetings) than in individual activities (like letters to the editor). Unfortunately for our detective strategy, synergistic effects (rather like an epidemic that has spread beyond its initial carrier) thwart unequivocal verdicts.3
Second, in our routine screening of the usual suspects, none stands out in the initial lineup. Civic disengagement appears to be an equal opportunity affliction. The sharp, steady declines in club meetings, visits with friends, committee service, church attendance, philanthropic generosity, card games, and electoral turnout have hit virtually all sectors of American society over the last several decades and in roughly equal measure. The trends are down among women and down among men, down on the two coasts and down in the heart-land, down among renters and down among homeowners, down in black ghettos and down in white suburbs, down in small towns and down in metropolitan areas, down among Protestants and down among Catholics, down among the affluent and down among the impoverished, down among singles and down among married couples, down among unskilled laborers and down among small-business people and down among top managers, down among Republicans and down among Democrats and down among independents, down among parents and down among the childless, down among full-time workers and down among homemakers.4
To be sure, the levels of civic engagement differ across these categories, as we have already noted—more informal socializing among women, more civic involvement among the well-to-do, less social trust among African Americans, less voting among independents, more altruism in small towns, more church attendance among parents, and so on. But the trends in civic engagement are very similar. For example, on average between 1974 and 1994, 18 percent of whites reported having attended a public meeting on local affairs in the previous year, as compared with only 13 percent of blacks, but each race’s rate of attendance was cut in half over those two decades. More people take part in local politics in rural Vermont in 1999 than in metropolitan Boston, but fewer people take part in local politics in rural Vermont in 1999 than did in 1959. In short, with respect to change in civic engagement, we do not find any readily identifiable “hot spots” on the demographic map of this anticivic epidemic that might provide easy clues as to its origins.
A plausible place to begin our inquiry, for example, might be with education. Education is one of the most important predictors—usually, in fact, the most important predictor—of many forms of social participation—from voting to associational membership, to chairing a local committee to hosting a dinner party to giving blood. To be sure, education has little effect on schmoozing— that is, informal social connectedness, like visiting friends or family dining—or on church attendance, although education is positively correlated with membership in church-related groups. On the other hand, education is an especially powerful predictor of participation in public, formally organized activities. Having four additional years of education (say, going to college) is associated with 30 percent more interest in politics, 40 percent more club attendance, and 45 percent more volunteering. College graduates are more than twice as likely to serve as an officer or committee member of a local organization, to attend a public meeting, to write Congress, or to attend a political rally. The same basic pattern applies to both men and women and to all races and generations. Education, in short, is an extremely powerful predictor of civic engagement.5
Why does education have such a massive effect on social connectedness?6 Education is in part a proxy for privilege—for social class and economic advantage—but when income, social status, and education are used together to predict various forms of civic engagement, education stands out as the primary influence. Educational attainment may conceivably be a marker of unusual ambition or energy or some other innate trait that also encourages civic involvement. Finally, educated people are more engaged with the community at least in part because of the skills, resources, and inclinations that were imparted to them at home and in school. In any event, whether across individuals or across states and localities or (during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century) across time, more education means more participation.
Although it is widely recognized that Americans today are better educated than our parents and grandparents, it is less often appreciated how massively and rapidly this trend transformed the educational composition of the adult population. As recently as 1960, only 41 percent of American adults had graduated from high school; in 1998, 82 percent had. In 1960, only 8 percent of American adults had a college degree; in 1998, 24 percent had. Between 1972 and 1998 the proportion of all adults with fewer than twelve years of education was cut in half, falling from 40 percent to 18 percent, while the proportion with more than twelve years nearly doubled, rising from 28 percent to 50 percent, as the generation of Americans educated around the dawn of the twentieth century (most of whom did not finish high school) passed from the scene and were replaced by the baby boomers and their successors (most of whom attended college).7
Thus education boosts civic engagement sharply, and educational levels have risen massively. Unfortunately, these two plain facts only deepen our central mystery. If anything, the growth in education should have increased civic engagement. Thus this first investigative foray leaves us more mystified than before. Whatever forces lie behind the slump in civic engagement and social capital, those forces have affected all levels in American society. Social capital has eroded among the one in every twelve Americans who have enjoyed the advantages of graduate study, it has eroded among the one in every eight Americans who did not even make it into high school, and it has eroded among all strata in between. The mysterious disengagement of the last third of a century has afflicted all echelons of our society.
Many possible answers have been suggested for this puzzle:
• Busyness and time pressure
• Economic hard times
• The movement of women into the paid labor force and the stresses of two-career families
• Residential mobility
• Suburbanization and sprawl
• Television, the electronic revolution, and other technological changes
• Changes in the structure and scale of the American economy, such as the rise of chain stores, branch firms, and the service sector, or globalization
• Disruption of marriage and family ties
• Growth of the welfare state
• The civil rights revolution
• The sixties (most of which actually happened in the seventies), including
• Vietnam, Watergate, and disillusion with public life
• The cultural revolt against authority (sex, drugs, and so on)
Most respectable mystery writers would hesitate to tally up this many plausible suspects, no matter how energetic their detective. I am not in a position to address all these theories—certainly not in any definitive form—but we must begin to winnow the list. It is tempting to assume that one big effect (like civic disengagement) has one big cause (like two-career families or materialism or TV), but that is usually a fallacy. A social trend as pervasive as the one we are investigating probably has multiple causes, so our task is to assess the relative importance of such factors.
A solution, even a partial one, to our mystery must pass several tests.
• Is the proposed explanatory factor correlated with social capital and civic engagement? If not, it is difficult to see why that factor should even be placed in the lineup. For example, many women have entered the paid labor force during the period in question, but if working women turned out to be no less engaged in community life than housewives, it would be harder to attribute the downturn in community organizations to the rise of two-career families.8
• Is the correlation spurious? If parents, for example, were more likely to be joiners than childless people, that might be an important clue. However, if the correlation between parental status and civic engagement turned out to be entirely due to the effects of age, for example, we would have to remove the declining birth rate from our list of suspects.
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