BOWLING ALONE
Page 28
In chapter 2 we noticed that collective forms of engagement, such as attending meetings, serving on committees, or working for a political party, had diminished much more rapidly over the last several decades than individual forms of engagement, such as writing to Congress or signing a petition. Both types of engagement can have political consequences, but only the former helps to foster and reinforce social connections. Television, it turns out, is bad for both individualized and collective civic engagement, but it is particularly toxic for activities that we do together. Whereas (controlling as always for demographic factors) watching lots of TV cuts individual activities, like letter writing, by roughly 10–15 percent, the same amount of additional TV viewing cuts collective activities, like attending public meetings or taking a leadership role in local organizations, by as much as 40 percent. In short, just as television privatizes our leisure time, it also privatizes our civic activity, dampening our interactions with one another even more than it dampens individual political activities.27
As we have seen, newshounds who watch television for information are
Figure 61: More TV Means Less Civic Engagement (Among College-Educated, Working-Age Adults)
more civic-minded than most other Americans. But most of us watch television for entertainment, not news. Of all Americans 7 percent say that they watch primarily for information, as compared with 41 percent who say they watch primarily for entertainment. (The rest of us say that we watch for both information and entertainment; the inextricable link between information and entertainment—“infotainment”—is a notable feature of television that distinguishes it from other media, like books or radio.)28 We have already seen that the news and public affairs programming seems to have, if anything, a positive effect on civic engagement. How about TV entertainment?
One way to detect the effects of television entertainment on social participation is to focus on those people—half of all Americans—who say that “television is my primary form of entertainment.” Not surprisingly, these people watch much more TV than other Americans, and they are much more likely to concede that “I’m what you would call a couch potato.”29 In terms of civic engagement these people who are most heavily dependent on televised entertainment turn out to differ most remarkably from the other half of the American population.
Considered in combination with a score of other factors that predict social participation (including education, generation, gender, region, size of hometown, work obligations, marriage, children, income, financial worries, religiosity, race, geographic mobility, commuting time, homeownership, and more), dependence on television for entertainment is not merely a significant predictor of civic disengagement. It is the single most consistent predictor that I have discovered.
People who say that TV is their “primary form of entertainment” volunteer and work on community projects less often, attend fewer dinner parties and fewer club meetings, spend less time visiting friends, entertain at home less, picnic less, are less interested in politics, give blood less often, write friends less regularly, make fewer long-distance calls, send fewer greeting cards and less e-mail, and express more road rage than demographically matched people who differ only in saying that TV is not their primary form of entertainment. TV dependence is associated not merely with less involvement in community life, but with less social communication in all its forms—written, oral, or electronic. This simple question turns out to distinguish those Americans who are most socially isolated from those most involved in their communities, as figures 62 to 66 illustrate. Nothing—not low education, not full-time work, not long commutes in urban agglomerations, not poverty or financial distress—is more broadly associated with civic disengagement and social disconnection than is dependence on television for entertainment.30
On average, Americans who definitely disagree that “television is my primary form of entertainment”—let’s call them TV minimalists—volunteer nine times a year. By contrast, TV maximalists—those who definitely agree that TV
Figure 62: TV Watching and Volunteering Don’t Go Together
Figure 63: TV Watchers Don’t Keep in Touch
Figure 64: TV Watching and Club Meetings Don’t Go Together
Figure 65: TV Watching and Churchgoing Don’t Go Together
Figure 66: TV Watching and Comity Don’t Go Together
provides their prime leisure activity—volunteer only four times a year. TV minimalists average eighteen letters a year to friends and relatives, TV maximalists only twelve. TV minimalists attend nine club meetings annually, compared with five for TV maximalists. TV minimalists attend church, on average, twenty-seven times a year, compared with nineteen for TV maximalists. In fact, reliance on televised entertainment is a strong negative predictor of church attendance, even controlling for religiosity. Among equally religious people, those who report that TV is their primary form of entertainment attend church substantially less often.31
The civic differences between the two groups are crystallized in figure 66: TV minimalists report more than three community projects a year and fewer than half that many instances in which they gave the finger to another driver. Among TV maximalists, this civility ratio is exactly reversed—twice as many rude gestures as community projects. Machers, schmoozers, and those who are simply civil are drawn disproportionately from the minority of Americans who are TV minimalists.
One can discover niches of resistance to TV dependency, but even there one can detect traces of its disengaging aura. Take, for example, well-educated, financially comfortable women from the Northeast in their thirties and early forties—the single demographic category in the nation most likely to disavow televised entertainment. Even in this select group, more than one in four confess that television is their primary leisure activity. Sure enough, compared with their TV-free sisters, the TV-afflicted volunteer 62 percent less often, go to 37 percent fewer club meetings, attend 27 percent fewer church services and 21 percent fewer dinner parties, entertain at home 20 percent less often, and report 24 percent more dissatisfaction with their lives.32
This negative correlation between television watching and social involvement also appears in time diaries and in surveys from many other countries. Both in this country and abroad, heavy television viewers are (even controlling for other demographic factors) significantly less likely to belong to voluntary associations and to trust other people. As TV ownership and usage spread across populations, it was linked, both in this country and abroad, to reduced contacts with relatives, friends, neighbors. More TV watching meant more time not just at home, but indoors, at the expense of time in the yard, on the street, and visiting in others’ homes.33
A dead-on summary of the impact of television on social capital came from a member of the traditional and close-knit Amish community in southeastern Pennsylvania in response to a visiting ethnographer, who had asked how the Amish know which technological inventions to admit and which to shun.
We can almost always tell if a change will bring good or bad tidings. Certain things we definitely do not want, like the television and the radio. They would destroy our visiting practices. We would stay at home with the television or radio rather than meet with other people. The visiting practices are important because of the closeness of the people. How can we care for the neighbor if we do not visit them or know what is going on in their lives?34
SO FAR we have discovered that television watching and especially dependence upon television for entertainment are closely correlated with civic disengagement. Correlation, however, does not prove causation. An alternative interpretation is this: People who are social isolates to begin with gravitate toward the tube as the line of leisurely least resistance. Without true experimental evidence—in which randomly selected individuals are exposed (or not exposed) to television over long periods of time—we cannot be sure that television itself is the cause of disengagement. (Since the putative effects of TV presumably build up over years, a few minutes’ viewing in a university lab is unlikely to replicate
the deeper effects that we’re talking about here.)
Truly conclusive evidence on this crucial point is not at hand, and given ethical restrictions on human experimentation, it is not likely to be available any time soon. (It is hard to know whether the louder public outcry against such an experiment would come on behalf of subjects forced to watch TV or those forced not to watch.) On the other hand, several sorts of evidence make the attribution of guilt in this case more plausible. First, the epidemic of civic disengagement began little more than a decade after the widespread availability of television. Moreover, as we shall see in more detail in chapter 14, the greater the youthful exposure of any cohort of individuals to television, the greater their degree of disengagement today. We have already noted that younger generations, exposed to television throughout their lives, are more habitual in their television usage and that habitual usage in turn is associated with lesser civic engagement.
Strikingly direct evidence about the causal direction comes from a range of intriguing studies of communities conducted just before and just after television was introduced. The most remarkable of these studies emerged from three isolated communities in northern Canada in the 1970s.35 Owing only to poor reception, residents of one (given the pseudonym Notel by the researchers) were without television as the study began. The “treatment” whose effects were observed was the introduction of a single channel to Notel residents—the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Life in Notel was compared with that of two other communities, Unitel and Multitel. Though it was very similar to Notel in other respects, during the two years of the study TV reception in Unitel went from CBC only to CBC plus the three American commercial networks. Multitel was similar in all relevant respects to the other two towns, although removed somewhat geographically. Residents of Multitel could receive all four channels throughout the span of the research.
Canadian researcher Tannis MacBeth Williams and her colleagues explained why this triad of towns constituted a true experiment:
Except for anachronistically lacking television reception in 1973, [Notel] was typical. It was accessible by road, had daily bus service in two directions, and its ethnic mix was not unusual. The town just happened to be located in a valley in such a way that the transmitter meant to serve the area did not provide television reception for most residents.36
Significant also is the fact that this study was conducted before the widespread availability of VCRs and satellite dishes. In other words, there will likely never be another example like this of an essentially TV-free community in an industrialized nation. The results clearly showed that the introduction of television deflated Notel residents’ participation in community activities. As the researchers report succinctly,
Before Notel had television, residents in the longitudinal sample attended a greater variety of club and other meetings than did residents of both Unitel and Multitel, who did not differ. There was a significant decline in Notel following the introduction of television, but no change in either Unitel or Multitel.37
The researchers also asked whether television affected only those who were peripherally involved in community activities or also the active leaders. Their conclusion:
Television apparently affects participation in community activities for individuals who are central to those activities, not just those who are more peripherally involved. Residents are more likely to be centrally involved in their community’s activities in the absence than in the presence of television.38
This study strongly suggests that television is not merely a concomitant of lower community involvement, but actually a cause of it. A major effect of television’s arrival was the reduction in participation in social, recreational, and community activities among people of all ages. Television privatizes leisure time.
Comparable though less conclusive evidence comes from studies of the introduction of television in England, South Africa, Scotland, Australia, and the United States.39 The effects of television on childhood socialization have been hotly debated for more than three decades. The most reasonable conclusion from a welter of sometimes conflicting results appears to be that heavy television watching probably increases aggressiveness (although perhaps not actual violence), that it probably reduces school achievement, and that it is statistically associated with “psychosocial malfunctioning,” although how much of this effect is self-selection and how much causal remains controversial. Heavy television watching by young people is associated with civic ignorance, cynicism, and lessened political involvement in later years, along with reduced academic achievement and lower earnings later in life. In an exhaustive review of this interdisciplinary literature on television’s effects on American social life, George Comstock and Haejung Paik conclude that the introduction of television has dampened the degree to which people engage in social activities outside of the home. None of these studies provides entirely unassailable support for the thesis that television viewing causes civic disengagement, but taken together the evidence certainly points in that direction.40
If television does reduce civic engagement, how does it do so? Broadly speaking, there are three possibilities:
• Television competes for scarce time.
• Television has psychological effects that inhibit social participation.
• Specific programmatic content on television undermines civic motivations.
Let’s review the evidence for each of these hypotheses.
Even though there are only twenty-four hours in everyone’s day, most forms of social and media participation are positively correlated. People who listen to lots of classical music are more likely, not less likely, than others to attend Cubs games. People who engage in do-it-yourself projects around the house are more likely than others to play a lot of volleyball and to do more public speaking. Even within demographically matched groups, people who attend more movies also attend more club meetings, more dinner parties, more church services, and more public gatherings, give more blood, and visit with friends more often. More than thirty years ago social psychologist Rolf Meyer-sohn noted this pattern in our leisure activities and dubbed it simply “the more, the more.”41
Television is, as Meyersohn observed, the principal exception to this generalization—the only leisure activity that seems to inhibit participation in other leisure activities. TV watching comes at the expense of nearly every social activity outside the home, especially social gatherings and informal conversations. The major casualties of increased TV viewing, according to time diaries, are religious participation, social visiting, shopping, parties, sports, and organizational participation. The only activities positively linked to heavy television watching are sleeping, resting, eating, housework, radio listening, and hobbies. Television viewers are anchored at home, and they recognize that fact themselves: heavy viewers generally agree that “I am a homebody,” whereas most light viewers don’t. Political scientists John Brehm and Wendy Rahn found that TV watching has such a powerful impact on civic engagement that one hour less daily viewing is the civic-vitamin equivalent of five or six more years of education. There is reason to believe that the displacement effects of television watching may be even more significant with respect to unstructured activities, such as hanging out with friends, than with respect to more formal activities, such as organizational meetings.42 In short, more time for TV means less time for social life.
Several times throughout the 1970s, just as (we now know) our national civic disengagement was gathering steam, the Roper organization asked Americans how their allocation of time and energy had changed in the recent years. Two broad conclusions emerged. First, as figure 67 shows, we massively shifted toward home-based activities (especially watching TV) and away from socializing outside the home. For example, 47 percent of all Americans reported that they were watching more TV than in the past, compared with only 16 percent who said they were watching less TV, for a net increase of 31 percent. Conversely, only 11 percent said they were spending more time than in the pas
t visiting friends and relatives who did not live “quite nearby,” as compared with 38 percent who said they were spending less time in that sort of socializing, for a net decrease of 27 percent. Almost without exception, activities outside the home were fading, while activities at home (especially watching TV) were increasing.43
Second, those who said they were spending more time watching TV than in the past were significantly less likely to attend public meetings, to serve in local organizations, to sign petitions, and the like than demographically matched people who said they were spending less time on TV. By contrast, the minority of people who reported spending more time with friends than in the past were also more likely to take part in civic life, even when compared with demographically identical groups.44 The link between increased television watching and decreased civic engagement at that crucial juncture is unusually clear.
IF TV STEALS TIME, it also seems to encourage lethargy and passivity. Time researchers Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi used an ingenious method to track our use of time and its effects on our psychic well-being.45 They persuaded subjects to carry beepers with them around the clock for a week, and when the beepers were randomly triggered, the subjects wrote down what they were doing and how they felt. Television viewing, Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi found, is a relaxing, low-concentration activity. Viewers feel passive and less alert after watching. On heavy-viewing evenings, people are also likely to engage in other low-energy, even slothful activities, whereas on light-viewing evenings, the same people spent more time outside the home in activities
Figure 67: Americans Began Cocooning in the 1970s
like sports and club meetings. Heavy viewing is associated with lots of free time, loneliness, and emotional difficulties. TV is apparently especially attractive for people who feel unhappy, particularly when there is nothing else to do.