BOWLING ALONE

by Robert D. Putnam

  TV itself is probably not the primary cause of these negative feelings, but it does not help much, either, except as a momentary escape. As Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi summarize their findings,

  Heavy viewers spend more time with TV, but find it is less rewarding…. Although… feeling badly in unstructured and solitary time leads to the use of television,… heavy viewing and the rapid montage of much contemporary television may also help reinforce an intolerance in the heavy viewer for daily moments that are not similarly chocked full of sight and sound…. It seems likely that heavy viewing helps perpetuate itself. Some television viewers grow dependent on the ordered stimuli of television or similar entertainments and become increasingly incapable of filling leisure time without external aids.46

  Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi report that these psychological concomitants of television watching are common in many cultures. British social psychologist Michael Argyle found that TV induces an emotional state best described as “relaxed, drowsy, and passive.” British researchers Sue Bowden and Avner Offer report:

  Television is the cheapest and least demanding way of averting boredom. Studies of television find that of all household activities, television requires the lowest level of concentration, alertness, challenge, and skill…. Activation rates while viewing are very low, and viewing is experienced as a relaxing release of tension. Metabolic rates appear to plunge while children are watching TV, helping them to gain weight.47

  As Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi conclude, television is surely habit-forming and may be mildly addictive. In experimental studies viewers generally demand a major bribe to give it up, even though viewers consistently report that television viewing is less satisfying than other leisure activities and even than work. In 1977 the Detroit Free Press was able to find only 5 out of 120 families willing to give up television for a month in return for $500. People who do give up TV reportedly experience boredom, anxiety, irritation, and depression. One woman observed, “It was terrible. We did nothing—my husband and I talked.”48

  As with other addictions, conclude Bowden and Offer,

  viewers are prone to habituation, desensitization, and satiation. …A researcher reported in 1989 that “virtually everyone in the television industry ardently believes that the audience attention span is growing shorter, and that to hold the audience, television editing must be even faster paced and present more and more exciting visual material.”…As consumers become accustomed to the new forms of stimulation, they require an ever stronger dose.49

  Although not immediately relevant to our central concern with civic engagement and social capital, self-avowed dependence on television for entertainment turns out to be correlated with a surprisingly wide range of physical and psychological ills. The DDB Needham Life Style surveys happen to include self-reports on headaches, indigestion, and sleeplessness. (Since the research was originally designed, among other things, to assist pharmaceutical marketers, it is not surprising that these measures were included.) We combined these three reports into a single index of “malaise”—people who score high on this measure are frequent victims of headaches, stomachaches, and insomnia. Figure 68 shows that malaise is closely associated with dependence on televised entertainment.50

  As always, we checked to see whether this unexpectedly strong correlation might be spurious—perhaps people in poor physical or financial shape have more headaches and also watch more TV. However, among several dozen potential

  Figure 68: TV Watchers Don’t Feel So Great

  predictors of malaise (including self-described physical health, financial anxiety, frequency of exercise, use of cigarettes, religiosity, various forms of social connectedness, and all standard demographic characteristics), the top four, far above all other factors, turned out to be physical health, financial insecurity, low education (a proxy for social class), and TV dependence. Not surprisingly, physical health was the strongest predictor of malaise, but the other three were essentially equal in predictive power. In other words, TV dependence is as disruptive to one’s constitution as financial anxiety and class deprivation. Without experimental research, we cannot prove which way the causal arrow points, but it is not obvious why people with a headache would disproportionately seek solace in TV. (We shall see later some evidence that generational differences are implicated here as well.) But whichever causes what, it is not a little distressing that by the end of the twentieth century more than half of all Americans said that TV was their primary form of entertainment.

  Like other addictive or compulsive behaviors, television seems to be a surprisingly unsatisfying experience. Both time diaries and the “beeper” studies find that for the average viewer television is about as enjoyable as housework and cooking, ranking well below all other leisure activities and indeed below work itself.51 TV’s dominance in our lives reflects not its sublime pleasures, but its minimal costs. Time researchers John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey conclude:

  Much of television’s attraction is that it is ubiquitous and undemanding…. As an activity, television viewing requires no advance planning, costs next to nothing, requires no physical effort, seldom shocks or surprises, and can be done in the comfort of one’s own home.52

  Another reason that television viewing is so negatively linked to social connectedness may be that it provides a kind of pseudopersonal connection to others. Anyone who has encountered a television personality face-to-face knows the powerful feeling that you already know this person. The daily cheer of morning anchors or the weekly drama of well-loved characters reassures us that we know these people, care about them, are involved in their lives—and no doubt they reciprocate those feelings (or so we subconsciously feel).

  Communications theorist Joshua Meyrowitz notes that the electronic media allow social ties to be divorced from physical encounters. “Electronic media create ties and associations that compete with those formed through live interaction in specific locations. Live encounters are certainly more ‘special’ and provide stronger and deeper relationships, but their relative number is decreasing.” Political communications specialist Roderick Hart argues that television as a medium creates a false sense of companionship, making people feel intimate, informed, clever, busy, and important. The result is a kind of “remote-control politics,” in which we as viewers feel engaged with our community without the effort of actually being engaged.53 Like junk food, TV, especially TV entertainment, satisfies cravings without real nourishment.

  By making us aware of every social and personal problem imaginable, television also makes us less likely to do anything about it. “When the problems of all others become relatively equal in their seeming urgency,” Meyrowitz notes, “it is not surprising that many people turn to take care of ‘number one.’” In a similar vein, political scientist Shanto Iyengar has shown experimentally that prevailing television coverage of problems such as poverty leads viewers to attribute those problems to individual rather than societal failings and thus to shirk our own responsibility for helping to solve them. Political scientist Allan McBride showed in a careful content analysis of the most popular TV programs that “television programs erode social and political capital by concentrating on characters and stories that portray a way of life that weakens group attachments and social/political commitment.” Television purveys a disarmingly direct and personal view of world events in a setting dominated by entertainment values. Television privileges personalities over issues and communities of interest over communities of place. In sum, television viewing may be so strongly linked to civic disengagement because of the psychological impact of the medium itself.54

  • • •

  PERHAPS, TOO, THE MESSAGE—in other words, the specific programmatic content—is also responsible for TV’s apparent anticivic effects. The DDB Needham Life Style surveys allow us to explore this possibility because, in addition to questions about social connectedness and civic involvement, the surveys elicit information about which specific programs the respondents “watch becaus
e you really like it.” While causality is impossible to extract from such evidence, we can construct a rough-and-ready ranking of which programs attract and/or create the most civic and least civic audiences.

  At the top of the pro-civic hierarchy (controlling, as always, for standard demographic characteristics, such as age and social class) are news programs and educational television. In the late 1990s the audiences for programs like the network news and public affairs presentations, NewsHour and other PBS shows, were generally more engaged in community life than other Americans, in part because these audiences tended to avoid other TV fare. At the other end of the scale fell action dramas (exemplified in an earlier era by The Dukes of Hazzard and Miami Vice), soap operas (such as Dallas and Melrose Place), and so-called reality TV (such as America’s Most Wanted and A Current Affair).55

  One way of gauging the impact of different types of programming on civic engagement (as distinct from simply the amount of time spent before the tube) is to compare the effects of increasing doses of news programs and of daytime TV, controlling not only for education, income, sex, age, race, employment and marital status, and the like, but also for the total time spent watching TV. As figure 69 shows, the more time spent watching news, the more active one is in the community, whereas the more time spent watching soap operas, game shows, and talk shows, the less active one is in the community.56 In other words, even among people who spend the same number of hours watching TV, what they watch is closely correlated with how active they are in community life.

  The clear distinction between the NewsHour audience and the Jerry Springer Show audience underscores the fact that not all television is antisocial. Experimental research has shown that pro-social programming can have pro-social effects, such as encouraging altruism.57 Moreover, television (especially, but not only, public affairs programming) can sometimes reinforce a wider sense of community by communicating a common experience to the entire nation, such as happened in the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion, and the Oklahoma City bombing. These were shared national experiences only because television brought the same painful images into our homes. Television at its civic best can be a gathering place, a powerful force for bridging social differences, nurturing solidarity, and communicating essential civic information.

  To this list of shared experiences, however, we must add the deaths of

  Figure 69: Types of Television Programs and Civic Engagement, Controlling for Time Spent Watching TV

  Diana and JFK Jr. and the O.J. trial, all of which purveyed more melodrama than civic enlightenment. The bonds nurtured by these common experiences are psychologically compelling, as virtually all of us can testify. But they are generally not sociologically compelling, in the sense of leading to action. Each episode is captivating, but few lead to enduring changes in the way we behave or connect. Child psychologists speak of a fairly primitive stage of social development called “parallel play”—two kids in a sandbox, each playing with a toy but not really interacting with each other. In healthy development children outgrow parallel play. But the public spectacles of television leave us at that arrested stage of development, rarely moving beyond parallel attentiveness to the same external stimulus.

  Television “in the wild,” so to speak, is represented mostly by programs that are empirically linked to civic disengagement. Those program types that are most closely associated with civic isolation constitute a massive and growing share of television programming. “Target marketing” and the advent of five-hundred-channel cable TV portend a further fragmentation of audiences along lines of social, economic, and personal interest.58 According to Nielsen Media Research, the number of channels received by the average household soared from nineteen in 1985 to forty-nine in 1997 and continues to rise. The ability of television to create a single national “water-cooler” culture has shrunk, as fewer and fewer of us watch common programs. In the early 1950s two-thirds of all Americans tuned in and watched the top-rated program (I Love Lucy); in the early 1970s the top-rated program (All in the Family) drew about half of the national TV audience; by the mid-1990s the audience share of ER and Seinfeld was barely one-third.59 This trend toward market segmentation provides choice and presumably thus enhances consumer satisfaction, but it also undercuts TV’s once vaunted role in bringing us together.

  Another probable effect of television (not just programming, but also the associated advertising) is its encouragement of materialist values. For example, according to media researcher George Gerbner and his colleagues, heavy-viewing adolescents “were more likely to want high status jobs that would give them a chance to earn a lot of money but also wanted to have their jobs be relatively easy with long vacations and time to do other things.” As we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, materialism among college freshmen has risen notably during the era of maximum television exposure, and while in college, students who watch more television become even more materialistic, compared with their fellow students who watch less TV or none at all.60

  In sum, the rise of electronic communications and entertainment is one of the most powerful social trends of the twentieth century. In important respects this revolution has lightened our souls and enlightened our minds, but it has also rendered our leisure more private and passive. More and more of our time and money are spent on goods and services consumed individually, rather than those consumed collectively. Americans’ leisure time can increasingly be measured—as do strategic marketers—in terms of “eyeballs,” since watching things (especially electronic screens) occupies more and more of our time, while doing things (especially with other people) occupies less and less. This emphasis on visual entertainment seems to be especially common among the generations who have been reared in the last several decades.61 Watching TV, videos, and computer windows onto cyberspace is ever more common. Sharing communal activities is ever less so.

  The apotheosis of these trends can be found, most improbably, at the Holiday Bowling Lanes in New London, Connecticut. Mounted above each lane is a giant television screen displaying the evening’s TV fare. Even on a full night of league play team members are no longer in lively conversation with one another about the day’s events, public and private. Instead each stares silently at the screen while awaiting his or her turn. Even while bowling together, they are watching alone.

  The effects of these new technologies on Americans’ worldview are most marked among the younger generations. Social critic Sven Birkerts emphasizes the historical rupture that the introduction of television signaled:

  There is a ledge, a threshold, a point after which everything is different. I would draw the line, imprecisely, somewhere in the 1950s. That was when television worked its way into the fabric of American life, when we grew accustomed to the idea of parallel realities—the one that we lived in, the other that we stepped into whenever we wanted a break from our living. People born after the mid-1950s are the carriers of the new; they make up the force that will push us out of our already-fading rural/small-town/urban understanding of social organization. The momentum of change has already made those designations all but meaningless.62

  Americans at the end of the twentieth century were watching more TV, watching it more habitually, more pervasively, and more often alone, and watching more programs that were associated specifically with civic disengagement (entertainment, as distinct from news). The onset of these trends coincided exactly with the national decline in social connectedness, and the trends were most marked among the younger generations that are (as we shall see in more detail in the next chapter) distinctively disengaged. Moreover, it is precisely those Americans most marked by this dependence on televised entertainment who were most likely to have dropped out of civic and social life—who spent less time with friends, were less involved in community organizations, and were less likely to participate in public affairs.

  The evidence is powerful and circumstantial, though because it does not derive from randomized experiments, it cannot be fully co
nclusive about the causal effects of television and other forms of electronic entertainment. Heavy users of these new forms of entertainment are certainly isolated, passive, and detached from their communities, but we cannot be entirely certain that they would be more sociable in the absence of television. At the very least, television and its electronic cousins are willing accomplices in the civic mystery we have been unraveling, and more likely than not, they are ringleaders.

  CHAPTER 14

  From Generation to Generation

  OUR EFFORTS THUS FAR to identify the culprits for civic disengagement have been fruitful but inconclusive. Television, sprawl, and pressures of time and money each contributes measurably to the problem. However, even the small, shrinking minority of Americans most insulated from such pressures—affluent single-wage-earner couples who live outside major metropolitan areas and seldom watch TV—have steadily disengaged from community and social life over the last two decades. Seemingly living in comfortably “square” 1950s Pleas-antville, even these folks went to half as many club meetings in the 1990s as people like them did in the 1970s and are five times more likely to be entirely disengaged from community life. Even in the tiny, civic-minded hamlets of pastoral Vermont, attendance at town meetings fell by nearly half between the early 1970s and the late 1990s.1 As we noted earlier, virtually no corner of American society has been immune to this anticivic contagion. It has affected men and women; central cities, suburbs, and small towns; the wealthy, the poor, and the middle class; blacks, whites, and other ethnic groups; people who work and those who don’t; married couples and swinging singles; North, South, both coasts, and the heartland.

  Age is the one striking exception to this uniformity. Age is second only to education as a predictor of virtually all forms of civic engagement, and trends in civic engagement are not uniform across all age categories. Middle-aged and older people are more active in more organizations than younger people, attend church more often, vote more regularly, both read and watch the news more frequently, are less misanthropic and more philanthropic, are more interested in politics, work on more community projects, and volunteer more.2