BOWLING ALONE

by Robert D. Putnam

  22. Edmondson, “In the Driver’s Seat.”

  23. Author’s analyses of DDB Needham Life Style, Roper Social and Political Trends, and Americans’ Use of Time survey archives, controlling for all standard demographic variables. In the Roper and Use of Time surveys commuting time is based on the respondent’s own estimate, whereas in the DDB Needham analysis the measure is the mean commuting time in the respondent’s county of residence. All approaches converge on the estimate that ten minutes more commuting means 10 percent less participation across many measures of civic engagement.

  24. In metropolitan areas with more than two million inhabitants the fraction who generally or definitely would prefer to live in a big city rather than in a small town fell from 38 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in 1999. For the debate about suburbia and the auto, see Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back (New York: Crown, 1997); Richard Moe and Carter Wilkie, Changing Places: Rebuilding Community in the Age of Sprawl (New York: Henry Holt, 1997); and James Q. Wilson, “Cars and Their Enemies,” Commentary 104 (July 1997): 17–23.

  25. Verba and Nie, Participation in America, 236, 247.

  26. The fraction of the population living in metropolitan areas has grown by roughly ten percentage points since the mid-1970s, and the civic penalty associated with such areas is, in round numbers, 20 percent, as suggested by figure 50, figure 51, and our analysis of the effects of commuting time. If Americans still lived spatially where we did in the mid-1970s, the aggregate level of community involvement might be roughly 2 percent higher, as compared with the drops of 20–40 percent registered in section II. This calculation is rough-and-ready and disregards synergistic effects.

  CHAPTER 13: TECHNOLOGY AND MASS MEDIA

  1. T. S. Eliot, New York Post, September 22, 1963.

  2. Sue Bowden and Avner Offer, “Household Appliances and the Use of Time: The United States and Britain Since the 1920s,” Economic History Review 47 (November 1994): 729, supplemented by data from the Statistical Abstract of the United States.

  3. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 517–518.

  4. Author’s analysis of General Social Survey, DDB Needham Life Style, and Roper archives, controlling for year of birth, sex, education, income, marital, parental and work status, size of city, race, and homeownership. Regular newspaper readers are roughly 10–20 percent more likely to participate in all the ways cited in the text. See also Pippa Norris, “Does Television Erode Social Capital? A Reply to Putnam,” PS: Political Science & Politics 29 (September 1996): 474–80, esp. 479; So Many Choices, So Little Time (Vienna, Va.: Newspaper Association of America, 1998), 15, 18; and Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics.

  5. Statistical Abstract of the United States (various years) and Historical Statistics of the United States.

  6. Author’s analysis of the General Social Survey archive; So Many Choices, So Little Time; Statistical Abstract of the United States; and Stu Tolley, “The Abyss That Is Destroying Daily Newspaper Reading” (Vienna, Va.: Newspaper Association of America, 1998), at www.naa.org/marketscope/research/cohort.htm.

  7. According to the 1998 DDB Needham Life Style survey, half of all Americans who read the news in a newspaper also watch the evening network news on TV, as compared with only one-quarter of those who do not read a newspaper. This correlation persists under stringent controls for all standard demographic factors.

  8. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style 1998 survey archive; Jack M. McLeod, Katie Daily, Zhongshi Guo, William P. Eveland Jr., Jan Bayer, Seungchan Yang, and Hsu Wang, “Community Integration, Local Media Use and Democratic Processes,” Communication Research 23 (1996): 179–209; Norris, “Does Television Erode Social Capital?”; Staci Rhine, Stephen Earl Bennett, and Richard S. Flickinger, “Americans’ Exposure and Attention to Electronic and Print Media and Their Impact on Democratic Citizenship” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, 1998).

  9. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, Internet News Takes Off, biennial news consumption survey (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 1998) at www.people-press.org/med98rpt.htm; Times Mirror Center, “Age of Indifference”; William G. Mayer, “The Polls-Poll Trends: Trends in Media Usage,” Public Opinion Quarterly 57 (June 1993): 593–611; Stephen Earl Bennett and Eric W. Rademacher, “‘The Age of Indifference’ Revisited: Patterns of Political Interest, Media Exposure, and Knowledge among Generation X,” in After the Boom: The Politics of Generation X, eds. Stephen C. Craig and Stephen Earl Bennett (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997); and Cliff Zukin, Generation X and the News: Road Closed? (Radio and Television News Directors Foundation, 1997), at www.rtndf.org/rtndf/genx/index.html. Richard Davis and Diana Owen, New Media and American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 136, report that in 1975 nearly half of all households watched network news every evening, compared with one-quarter in 1997.

  10. Pew Center, Internet News Takes Off; Norris, “Who Surfs?” 80–82; author’s analysis of the 1998 DDB Needham Life Style survey archive, which is the source of the generalization about CNN in the text.

  11. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style 1996–98 survey archive: respondents who say that they rely primarily on the Internet for news are less likely than other Americans to volunteer, to spend time with friends, to trust others, and so on.

  12. Statistical Abstract of the United States (various years); Veronis, Suhler & Associates, Communications Industry Report: Five-Year Historical Report (1991–95) (New York: Veronis, Suhler & Associates, 1996); Cobbett S. Steinberg, TV Facts (New York: Facts on File, 1980); Russell, Master Trend, 59; “People, Opinion, and Polls: American Popular Culture,” Public Perspective, August/September 1995: 47; Robert T. Bower, The Changing Television Audience in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), esp. 33, 46; George Comstock et al., Television and Human Behavior (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); George Comstock, Evolution of American Television (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1989); and Doris A. Graber, Mass Media and American Politics (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1993).

  13. Data in this paragraph exclude time when television is merely on in the background. Comstock, Evolution of American Television, 17, reports that “on any fall day in the late 1980s, the set in the average television owning household was on for about eight hours.” According to Eurodata TV ( One Television Year in the World: Audience Report, April 1999), the United States ranks third out of forty-seven nations in viewing hours per day, behind only Japan and Mexico. Thanks to Pippa Norris for advice about the media and participation. Robinson and Godbey, Time for Life, 136–153, 340–341.

  14. Statistical Abstract of the United States (various years); Kids & Media @ The New Millennium (Menlo Park, Calif.: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 1999), 13. Data on Internet access in figure 56 are from the DDB Needham Life Style archive; these data are quite consistent with other surveys of Internet usage, such as the Nielsen and IntelliQuest surveys summarized in Nua Internet Surveys (Dublin, Ireland: Nua Ltd., 1999), at www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/n_america.htlml (consulted December 11, 1999) and the January 1999 report by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, www.people-press.org/tech98sum.htm.

  15. Where Does the Time Go? The United Media Enterprises Report on Leisure in America (New York: Newspaper Enterprise Association, 1983), 10; author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style archive. Preference for a quiet evening at home rose from 68 percent in 1975 to 77 percent in 1999. Those who agreed were also more likely to agree that “TV is my primary form of entertainment.”

  16. Kunstler, Geography of Nowhere, 167.

  17. Paul William Kingston and Steven L. Nock, “Time Together Among Dual Earner Couples,” American Sociological Review 52 (June 1987): 391–400; Zukin, Generation X and the News; Diane Crispell, “TV Soloists,” American Demographics, May 1997, 32; Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csi
kszentmihalyi, Television and the Quality of Life: How Viewing Shapes Everyday Experience (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990), 74; Kids & Media, 62–63. As early as 1996, of the 76 percent of kids (ages nine to seventeen) who had their own bedroom, 59 percent had their own television, 55 percent had a cable/satellite hookup, 36 percent a video game system, and 39 percent a VCR; source: www.yankelovich.com/press3.htm.

  18. Author’s analysis of Roper Social and Political Trends surveys in 1979, 1985, 1989, and 1993; David E. Campbell, Steven Yonish, and Robert D. Putnam, “Tuning In, Tuning Out Revisited: A Closer Look at the Causal Links between Television and Social Capital,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (Atlanta, Ga., September 1999). Thanks to my coauthors for their many insights into this topic. They are, however, not responsible for my conclusions here.

  19. Thanks to Steve Yonish for spotting this line as part of his research duties watching late-night movies.

  20. Author’s analysis of Roper Social and Political Trends archive. More than half of the trend in figure 57 reflects generational differences. Generation more strongly predicts habitual viewing than does any other demographic characteristic. See also Campbell, Yonish, and Putnam, “Tuning In, Tuning Out Revisited.”

  21. Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson, The Ambitious Generation: America’s Teenagers, Motivated but Directionless (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 189–211.

  22. Figure 59 is limited to weekday watching, but the figures for weekend watching are similar. These surveys do not reveal how much time during each period was occupied by TV viewing; thus they somewhat exaggerate the fraction of the public viewing TV at any given moment. For confirmation of these patterns of TV viewing, see Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi, Television and the Quality of Life, 75 (for the United States); and Michael Argyle, Social Psychology of Everyday Life (New York: Routledge, 1991), 111 (for the United Kingdom).

  23. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style survey data, 1993–98. The TV-during-dinner rate is 39 percent for married couples with children at home and 55 percent for other adults. An additional 7 percent of all adults say that the TV was on in the background during dinner. According to America’s Youth in the 1990s, Bezilla, ed., 39, and Catherine McGrath, “Busy Teenagers,” American Demographics, July 1998, 37–38, in 1990, 39 percent of teenagers reported that TV was on during dinner, a figure that had risen to 50 percent by 1997.

  24. Author’s analysis of Roper Social and Political Trends archive, based on surveys in 1985 and 1989. The figure for watching TV includes both news (58 percent) and other programs (68 percent).

  25. All estimates in this and the following two paragraphs are based on multivariate logistic regression analyses of Roper surveys from 1973, 1974, 1977, 1983, 1988, 1991, and 1993, controlling for education, income, marital, parental, and work status, sex, age, race, region, and city size. Only social class (as measured by education and income) rivals television viewing as a predictor of all twelve forms of civic participation in the Roper archive. Figure 61 is limited to working-age, college-educated respondents and to four common measures of participation to illustrate that the negative correlation is strong even within the most civically engaged segment of the population, but the pattern is found across all subsets of the population and all measures of participation. Of working-age, college-educated Americans, 17 percent reported watching less than an hour of TV per day, 54 percent one to three hours, and 29 percent more than three hours. For the population as a whole, the equivalent figures were 12 percent, 43 percent, and 45 percent.

  26. This estimate is intended only to indicate the potential order of magnitude of the effect of television on civic engagement: civic engagement declined roughly 40 percent over the last third of the century, and additional TV viewing over those years might account for a 10 percent decline.

  27. This pattern appears in both the Roper Social and Political Trends data and the DDB Needham Life Style data; see Campbell, Yonish, and Putnam, “Tuning In, Tuning Out Revisited.”

  28. Evidence in this paragraph comes from Roper Social and Political Trends surveys in 1973–75, 1988, and 1993; see Campbell, Yonish, and Putnam, “Tuning In, Tuning Out Revisited.”

  29. All generalizations in this and the following six paragraphs are based on the author’s analysis of the DDB Needham Life Style survey archive. The fraction of respondents who agree that “television is my primary form of entertainment” has tended to rise from about 47 percent in the 1970s to about 53 percent in the 1990s. (Inexplicably, the fraction surged sharply to 60–65 percent in 1987–88 and then declined somewhat, but the secular trend is upward.) Of those who rely on TV for entertainment, 47 percent also concede that “I’m what you’d call a couch potato,” as compared with 17 percent of other Americans. Based on the time slots per day in which they report watching TV, those who say that TV is their primary form of entertainment watch about 40 percent more TV than other Americans. This question effectively singles out the one American in every two who is most dependent upon television entertainment.

  30. Figures 62 to 66 present bivariate relationships, but all generalizations in this paragraph and the previous one are based on multiple regression analysis, controlling for sex, race, year of birth, year of survey, education, income, financial worries, region, size of city, marital, parental, and employment status, self-reported physical health, expected mobility, homeownership, self-reported time pressure, and mean commuting time in county of residence. In virtually every case, the respondent’s self-described dependence on television for entertainment (measured on a six-point scale) is one of the two or three strongest predictors; it is the single most consistent predictor across all measures of public and private sociability.

  31. Author’s analysis of the DDB Needham Life Style archive. Religiosity is measured by agreement that “religion is important in my life.”

  32. The DDB Needham Life Style surveys between 1975 and 1998 include three hundred female college grads aged thirty to forty-four in the financially most secure third of the population and living in New England or the mid-Atlantic states. The statistics in the text compare civic involvement among the 28 percent of these women who agree that “TV is my primary form of entertainment” and the 72 percent who disagree. These comparisons thus control for sex, region, education, financial worries, and age, the five factors most closely correlated with reliance on televised entertainment. For the measure of life contentment, see chapter 20.

  33. Robinson and Godbey, Time for Life, 139–144; Harwood K. McClerking and Kristina C. Miler, “The Deleterious Effect of Television Viewership on Membership in Voluntary Organizations” (paper prepared for the annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, Norfolk, Va., November 1997); Harwood K. McClerking, Kristina C. Miler, and Irfan Nooruddin, “Must See TV? A Non-Random Assignment Model of Television and Membership” (paper prepared for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, September 1998); and Pippa Norris, “Blaming the Messenger? Television and Civic Malaise,” in Pharr and Putnam, What’s Troubling the Trilateral Democracies?

  34. Tay Keong Tan, “Silence, Sacrifice, and Shoo-Fly Pies: An Inquiry Into the Social Capital and Organizational Strategies of the Amish Community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1998).

  35. The Impact of Television: A Natural Experiment in Three Communities, ed. Tannis MacBeth Williams (Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press, 1986). Thanks to David Campbell for reviewing the literature on the effects of television on community life.

  36. Williams, Impact of Television, 2.

  37. Ibid., 166.

  38. Ibid., 178.

  39. William A. Belson, “Effects of Television on the Interests and Initiative of Adult Viewers in Greater London,” British Journal of Psychology 50 (1959): 145–158; Wilbur Schramm, Jack Lyle, and Edwin B. Parker, Television in the Lives of our Children (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961), on t
he United States; J. R. Brown, J. K. Cramond, and R. J. Wilde, “Displacement Effects of Television and the Child’s Functional Orientation to Media” in The Uses of Mass Communications: Current Perspectives on Gratifications, eds. Jay G. Blumler and Elihu Katz (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1974), on Scotland; John P. Murray and Susan Kippax, “Children’s Social Behavior in Three Towns with Differing Television Experience,” Journal of Communication 28 (1978): 19–29, on Australia; and Diana C. Mutz, Donald F. Roberts, and D. P. van Vuuren, “Reconsidering the Displacement Hypothesis: Television’s Influence on Children’s Time Use,” Communication Research 20 (1993): 51–75, on South Africa. Karl Erik Rosengren and Sven Windahl, Media Matter: TV Use in Childhood and Adolescence (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1989), report counterevidence from a study of Swedish children.

  40. Richard G. Niemi and Jane Junn, Civic Education: What Makes Students Learn (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999); Alan S. Zuckerman, “First Steps into Politics: The Political Bases of the Decisions of Young People to Engage in Political Discussion” (Providence, R.I.: Brown University, 1998); Jay Braatz and Robert D. Putnam, “Community-Based Social Capital and Educational Performance: Exploring New Evidence” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1999); John Condry, “Thief of Time, Unfaithful Servant: Television and the American Child,” Daedalus 122 (winter 1993): 259–278; William T. Bielby, “The Cost of Watching Television: A Longitudinal Assessment of the Effect of Heavy Viewing on Earnings,” working paper (Boston: Harvard University School of Public Health, n.d.); George Comstock and Haejung Paik, Television and the American Child (New York: Academic Press, 1991), 72, 86.