Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community

Rating:
Summary: A Guaranteed Landmark Social Analysis
Review: It takes until the last (24th) chapter to learn about it, but there exists a group of thirty-three "accomplished thinkers" organized by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government to think about how to put American society back together again.

I became an apartment-dweller, a transient, in 1975 while I was in college and remained one until I bought my first house in 1997. Since then, I have been surprised to find how disengaged I am from my neighbors and how difficult it is to form the types of neighborhood relationships that sustained me and enhanced my family when I was a kid.

During my college and grad school days, even as a transient, I thought I was witnessing a withdrawal by my fellow Americans from the ordinary behaviors of good citizenship and mutual respect. I have been especially aware, for instance, that shoppers will now go not even five feet to place a shopping cart in a parking lot rack. They leave them instead to occupy parking spaces and be windblown to dent other people's cars.

In Robert Putnam's June 2000 book, Bowling Alone - The Collapse and Revival of American Community, the author presents an exhaustive study of Americans' withdrawal from community and civic life since the mid-20th century. It is certainly a book for social scientists, with over a thousand references (I couldn't count them), but I am not a social scientist and the book fully engaged me, too.

Bowling Alone (the title comes from the fact that bowling is at an all-time high while league bowling is declining) is presented in four parts - and I paraphrase - what is happening?, why is it happening?, what does it matter?, and what do we do about it?

The first, "Trends in Civic Engagement and Social Capital," sounds bookish but contains alarming revelations about just how superficial we are in our public participation. For instance, we belong to do-gooder organizations, but we do not meet with our fellow do-gooders in local groups. Instead, we put a check in the mail - usually to whichever organization has maintained the steadiest bombardment of junk mail solicitations. As Putnam says in these chapters, "Citizenship by proxy is an oxymoron." Trends in religious participation are also interesting: attendance at "mainstream" churches is down while churches at the ends of the spectrum have experienced gains - and a primary characteristic of the fringe churches is a disengagement from society rather than becoming a part of the community fabric for civic improvement.

The "why" section of the book comprises good, solid, well-referenced research. I have written in the op-ed section of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Dec 1999) that I suspected anonymity (I blamed air-conditioning) and the geographic mobility requirements of modern work. Putnam says I am right about anonymity (but that it is television, not air-conditioning that is responsible) and wrong about mobility (it would seem to make sense, but our troubles started long after we became as mobile as we are today).

What does it matter? Our diminished sense of community degrades education, safe neighborhoods, economic prosperity, personal health and happiness, and the health of our democracy. For instance, would you guess that joining a club statistically will improve your health as much as quitting smoking?

Finally, what are we to do? In these final two chapters, I learned some American history about the Gilded Age (leading up to 1900) and the Progressive Era (1900-1930's) and found that the same concerns about societal declines arose and society eventually found answers (although, it seems that it took the unifying influences of world wars to knit us together to work for the common good.)

Dr. Putnam, a Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, shares with us some of the suggestions of the Saguaro Seminar thinkers mentioned at the top of this review. I predict that one hundred years hence, social analysts will be trying to figure out what went wrong in America in the 21st century and they will be citing Putnam's book early and often.

This book is a good read, conversational in tone, and should be of particular interest to anyone trying to figure out why young people are shooting each other in schoolyards these days.

Rating:
Summary: What isn't Social Capital, Reification of a Good Idea
Review: Unfortunately, the author doesn't know where social capital ends. It seems like every possible organization under the sun is defined as a source of social capital, provided it was expanding in the post WWII period and declined later on. The concept of social capital is applied so broadly it ends up meaningless. Reification of a good idea.

Rating:
Summary: Hits the Nail on the Head!!
Review: This fine book really nails it.The days of social interaction through community affairs are history.This is why we have such a lazy,apathetic lifestyle these days.Change,which has been the big buzzword for the past 20 years,has gotten to the point where we have had so much of it in such a short period of time,that we can no longer recognize the world that we have created for ourselves.Too much technology jammed down our throat in the past decade has turned people into chipheads instead of human beings. Why communicate with each other when we have such ESSENTIAL devices like e-mail,voice mail,etc.Why go bowling and do other community type recreational activities when we have the internet to play around with.Welcome to the new millenium!!

Rating:
Summary: ZZZZZZZZZZZ.......
Review: The title of this book is so much more promising that the actual body. The premise that we have been becoming more disconnected as a society,and thus, are more dissatisfied is provocative. This is a book for those who enjoy graphs and indexes, and pie charts. I read it as a class assignment and it felt just like that...homework.

Rating:
Summary: Supremely interesting
Review: I've never read a book with more facts that was more interesting. Mr. Putnam condenses massive amounts of data collected from surveys and polls that chronicles civic participation (social capital) of Americans since before World War II into a thoughtful work that ponders our declining interest in community participation. He considers all manner of data from "time diaries" to sales of playing cards, and presents a clear case that modern day Americans have a declining stock of social capital. However, the reader is not left in this depressing state. Mr. Putnam considers ways of increasing social capital and community involvement. Bowling Alone is highly readable, and in many ways inspiring. This is well worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: Terrific & Penetrating View At American Loss Of Community!
Review: It amazes me how often an academic with an important piece of the truth about the nature of contemporary social reality becomes embroiled in an avalanche of escalating public expectations & hyperbole until suddenly he is expected to become a hopped-up social prophet singularly able to explain, detail and unravel the heretofore-mysterious elements of our existential dilemma. Such is the case here with Professor Putnam's provocative findings regarding social disintegration in the America of the '90s.

This is an absorbing book, the result of Putnam's efforts to expand a short article Putnam had written regarding the observable facts of increasing social isolation and personal disconnection within our culture. Here he employs new data substantiating and extending the details of his original thesis, indicating that on almost every measure investigated, individual Americans are less likely to regularly socialize with their peers, becoming more isolated, more fractious, and less friendly to others than they have been in the recent past. The book is written in an engaging way, and entertains and seduces the reader with amusing (as well as frightening) facts and figures regarding the degree of animosity and alienation individual citizens feel.

Of course, it is easy to become so enthralled with reading through the entertaining list of particulars he enumerates than to pay heed to the burgeoning shapes and images lurking beneath the data; i.e., concerned readers should engage themselves in locating all this information usefully within a meaningful social context. Increasing social isolation and the progressive breakdown in what sociologists call social cohesion are not new phenomena, but have been steadily eroding the social fabric and our feelings of connectedness to one another for over a century. In fact, at the turn of the 20th century both Emile Durkheim and Max Weber were warning of the social dangers associated with the rise of a rational, secular and materialistic social milieu. Reading other recent books such as Sales Kirkpatrick's "Rebels Against The Future" or Philip Slater's classic 1970 book "Pursuit of Loneliness" give one a much better grounding in how the degree of social isolation and civil alienation are related to what is happening in the larger social surround individuals find themselves in.

In essence, the kinds of isolation detailed so well in this tome are the result of the long-term corrosive effects of materialism, with concentration on capital acquisition and gaining more wealth and more affluent lifestyles. Indeed, if one reads the recent book "The Overworked American" by Juliet Schor, one gets the distinct impression that many Americans are so focused on "getting ahead' that anything interfering with this obsessive reach for greater material security gets short shrift in contemporary society. There should be no confusion about the nature of the problem that confronts us; we have no community because we have no culture left. The revolution of scientific change and technical innovation has systematically swept away the web of meanings we once had to integrate and make sense of all this. All we really have today is a mutual acquisition society, based primarily on our mutual lust for material goods and minimally constrained by the skeletal rules and regulations civil society sets for the nature of the material quest. This is a terrific book. Read it.

Rating:
Summary: Highly thought-provoking and highly persuasive
Review: On the positive side, Putnam's thesis is both important and fascinating. There is a ton of food for thought in this well written, thought-provoking and somewhat depressing scholarly work. Moreover, Putnam backs up his conclusions with solid, nearly overwhelming, evidence. I also thought that Chapter 6 (informal social connections) was particularly interesting because for most Americans, it is these connections that are of most importance. Section III (explaining the dropoff in social interactions) was also particularly excellent. The chapter on technology and mass media contains the most compelling evidence one will ever see for the dangers of television. For these reasons, I would certainly recommend the book to anyone interested in the state of American society, circa 2000. (I wonder what Toqueville would say if he were doing his travels now rather than in the 1830's and 1840's?)

Havis said this, I could not quite bring myself to give the book 5 stars. So much of it was SO dense and statistic-laden that moving through much of the book was like walking through a 2-foot snowdrift--every step a chore. Not all of the book was like this, mind you, but alot of it was. Instead of 400 pages of text and 100 pages of footnotes and appendices, it might have been better if those numbers were reversed.

Finally, I must comment on the many charts in Section 4 which show all of the correlations between levels of social capital in various States and various quality of life measures (health, violence, TV watching, crime, etc.) Based on these charts, if someone were coming to this country for the first time with their family and deciding where to settle, they would be foolish not to settle in one of the Dakotas, which scored first and second on just about every quality of life index. But something must be wrong with this picture. It just isn't too often that you hear people singing the praises of North Dakota or South Dakota as being Nirvana-like places to live (or about people moving there in droves). The same is true for the other states that scored well--e.g. Nebraska, Montana, etc. Maybe the depressing message is that the only way to have high levels of social capital (and all of the posiitve things that go with it) in 21st century America is to live in a place where there is so little going on and where the climate may be lousy, that people are forced to interact with another on a more frequent basis than if one lived in say, San Francisco. If so, that's a real Hobson's choice. You have a choice of living in a place where there is great community life (because there is nothing to do other than community life in that area) or live in place that has many more inherently desirable characteristics and far lower levels of social capital (and all the negatives that go with that). Perhaps it is too stark to present the choice this way, but that certainly seems to be the message to be derived from Putnam's charts.

Rating:
Summary: Can You Handle the Truth?
Review: Putnam's commentary on modern American life is frightening at best.

I read Putnam's article by the same title in college and it left a lasting imprint because it crystalized my feeling that Americans are no longer involving themselves in civic and community life. His new book expounds on this depressing thesis and explains, in tremendous detail how Americans no longer value civic engagement or regard relationships with neighbors as worthwhile. He cites declines in participation in public clubs such as the Shriners and Elks clubs as well as more informal social gatherings like poker playing and family dinners. Using statistics and time diaries he plots indicators of civic engagement from its peak in the early 1960's and its subsequent decline thereafter. The greatest casualty throughout this transformation is in social capital, a term which predates Putnam and describes the emotional and practical benefits of personal relationship.

Putnam shows that civic clubs that have shown growth in membership since the 1960's have mostly been in massive national organizations whose membership is nothing more than people on mailing lists who pay an annual fee. Furthermore, religious organizations, whose members participate in their communities at greater rates than non church goers, are beginning to change their focus from civic participation to only tending to the needs of their church members.

The affects of this disengagement have impacted our health, democracy and safety. Putnams points out an axiomatic principle that as people associate with one another in various capacities, whether it be at the kitchen table, the sidewalk, the card club or the PTA, people form relationships that provide a pool of friends who can be relied upon when time are hard, the dog needs to be walked, or the poor elderly woman next door needs her home painted. Each relationship is an asset, the accumulation of which can be called one's "social capital."

Putnam does not place the blame for this on one source, but cites the entrance of women into the workforce, high levels of divorce, and urban sprawl among others as possible contributors. His most damning remarks are reserved for television. According to Putnam, no single technology has had such a damaging effect on America's civic and personal relationships. I enjoyed his attack on TV on a personal level because I decided 5 years ago to throw away my television and have never looked back.

Certainly, Putnam's concerns are not new. He admits to this and provides the reader with an excellent look at the Progressive Era when American's decided to solve the vexing problems of an industialized urban society by forming civic clubs and actively involving themselves in their community.

This is not a particularly fun book to read. In summary, it details how Americans have become spectators on life. The recent success of "reality based" television programs only illustrates how we have traded the potential richness of personal relationships for a false reality on our television screens. Life is about personal relationships, and it is sad to see how Americans have avoided these relationships.

Putnam is not all gloom and doom. As with everything, hope abounds. After reading this book, one should only be encouraged to find ways to involve himself or herself in their communities and invite the neighbors over for a BBQ. This is an important social commentary, and I encourage all to read it.

Rating:
Summary: Densely packed but fruitful
Review: Bowling Alone is a pretty weighty tome with an increidble density of facts and figures. Subtitled "The Collapse and Revival of American Community", that fourth word is the only thing that gets you through the first third of the book which is staggeringly depressing. Using a huge variety of cross-referenced statistics normalized for race, income, and everything else, Robert D. Putnam, a Hahvahd professor of Public Policy, shows how people are participating less and less in politics, civics, religion, workplace-related social connections, informal social connections, volunteering less, trusting less, and generally meeting with others less.

Section II asks why, looks at changes over generations, blames television and points out that the only factor that is likely to increase a person's social involvement is education. He follows up on the social connections glanced at and questioned at the second of Section I and sums up the reasons for an overwhelming decline in social involvement. Interestingly, he claims the reason for Silicon Valley's greater influence in the world over Boston's Route 128 area is one of greater social capital.

Section III is the kicker though, and the real problem is that you have to wade through 350 pages of dense and depressing graphs and statistics to get to it, but if you didn't then you wouldn't believe the conclusions. People with more social capital are healthier (backed up by a big metric buttload of statistics, summed up as "people who are socially disconnected are between two and five times more likely to die from all causes, compared with matched individuals who have close ties with family, friendsa nd the community."). Then, on a state-by-state basis, he shows the connection between social capital and health, mortality rate, tax evasion, civic equity and income distribution. It's powerful stuff, and a bit overwhelming, but the results are impressive none the less.

His conclusions are simply that we need more social capital, more formal and informal group meetings and time spent with others, and that the net gain as individuals and as a society is enormous. He looks at where that's likely to happen and how: I think that's something that can be read from a business point of view as a very big picture. I think that there is an immediate benefit to any thinking about human resources in any way.

I can't in all conscience recommend that you all read this. It's just too damn dense, too hard and slow to slog through. I'm hoping I'll get around to writing all the pages I dogeared down into a file, as there's some awesome statistics in there: at random, p 212 American adults spend 72 mins driving a day p 321 One half of people get their jobs through a friend or relative p 217 In 1890 the telephone took 67 years to grow from 1% to 75% saturation; in 1948 the television took 7. p 227 85% of adults watch prime-time television; more amazing is that during any given waking hour at least one quarter of adults report some TV viewing.

Highly recommended for our ethnographers. Recommended for those of you who like backing speeches and presentations up with big-picture statistics. A good bathroom read, sort of a social "A Pattern Language."

Rating:
Summary: An awfully big axe
Review: Robert Putnam has gathered more statistics than one would think possible in his effort to prove that communities are under siege in America. Most of these facts boil down to the central conclusion that we go out less often in smaller groups, and when we're out there, we're less civil to each other.

All this does support his point admirably. However, as one willing to concede his point from the very beginning (is anyone out there likely to argue the opposite), I would have been interested in a more detailed and (dare I say it?) more theoretical discussion of causes and implications, beyond the old chestnut that "this Brave New World is changing everything, and it's hard to predict what will come next."