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May 8 - December 7, 2019
During the campaign itself, direct-mail and radio and television sound-bite advertising, much of it deceptive, is more important than grassroots activity. It is thus hardly surprising that campaign spending is a strong predictor of the outcome and that surveys indicate “a very low degree of voter sophistication” on referenda issues.
The poverty of social cues in computer-mediated communication inhibits interpersonal collaboration and trust, especially when the interaction is anonymous and not nested in a wider social context.
Computer-mediated communication is good for sharing information, gathering opinions, and debating alternatives, but building trust and goodwill is not easy in cyberspace.
an early experimental study found that extensive Internet usage seemed to cause greater social isolation and even depression.
Despite somewhat conflicting evidence, it seems reasonable to conclude that the last three decades have seen no general decline in free time in America that might explain civic disengagement.
We all know that the way to get something done is to give it to a busy person.
Economic hard times lower our incomes, raise our debt levels, and make our jobs more precarious (and perhaps more demanding). Stress rises, and civic engagement falls.
When ethnographer M. P. Baumgartner lived in a suburban New Jersey community in the 1980s, rather than the compulsive togetherness ascribed to the classic suburbs of the 1950s, she found a culture of atomized isolation, self-restraint, and “moral minimalism.” Far from seeking small-town connectedness, suburbanites kept to themselves, asking little of their neighbors and expecting little in return.
In the last half of the century television and its offspring moved leisure into the privacy of our homes. As the poet T. S. Eliot observed early in the television age, “It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.”
A major commitment to television viewing—such as most of us have come to have—is incompatible with a major commitment to community life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The younger you are, the worse things have gotten over the last decades of the twentieth century in terms of headaches, indigestion, sleeplessness, as well as general satisfaction with life and even likelihood of taking your own life.
As yet, this remarkable, well-established, and disturbing trend toward suicide, depression, and malaise among America’s younger generations has no widely accepted interpretation. One plausible explanation, however, is social isolation.
Social isolation is a well-established risk factor for serious depression. In part, depression causes isolation (partly because depressed people choose isolation and partly because depressed people are not pleasant to be around). However, there is also reason to believe that isolation causes depression.
For most of us, our deepest sense of belonging is to our most intimate social networks, especially family and friends. Beyond that perimeter lie work, church, neighborhood, civic life, and the assortment of other “weak ties” that constitute our personal stock of social capital.
People who have active and trusting connections to others—whether family members, friends, or fellow bowlers—develop or maintain character traits that are good for the rest of society.
many Americans—perhaps even most of us—get our jobs through personal connections. If we lack that social capital, economic sociologists have shown, our economic prospects are seriously reduced, even if we have lots of talent and training (“human capital”).
Social capital also operates through psychological and biological processes to improve individuals’ lives. Mounting evidence suggests that people whose lives are rich in social capital cope better with traumas and fight illness more effectively.
Higher levels of social capital, all else being equal, translate into lower levels of crime.
At the individual level, social connections affect one’s life chances. People who grow up in well-to-do families with economically valuable social ties are more likely to succeed in the economic marketplace, not merely because they tend to be richer and better educated, but also because they can and will ply their connections. Conversely, individuals who grow up in socially isolated rural and inner-city areas are held back, not merely because they tend to be financially and educationally deprived, but also because they are relatively poor in social ties that can provide a “hand up.”
In his pioneering work on job searchers during the 1970s, Mark Granovetter documented the counterintuitive fact that casual acquaintances can be more important assets than close friends and family for individuals in search of employment.
Research now under way suggests that social isolation has measurable biochemical effects on the body. Animals who have been isolated develop more extensive atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) than less isolated animals, and among both animals and humans loneliness appears to decrease the immune response and increase blood pressure.
The bottom line from this multitude of studies: As a rough rule of thumb, if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half.
In any given year 10 percent of Americans now suffer from major depression, and depression imposes the fourth largest total burden of any disease on Americans overall. Much research has shown that social connections inhibit depression. Low levels of social support directly predict depression, even controlling for other risk factors, and high levels of social support lessen the severity of symptoms and speed recovery. Social support buffers us from the stresses of daily life. Face-to-face ties seem to be more therapeutic than ties that are geographically distant. In short, even within the
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Psychologist Martin Seligman argues that more of us are feeling down because modern society encourages a belief in personal control and autonomy more than a commitment to duty and common enterprise. This transformation heightens our expectations about what we can achieve through choice and grit and leaves us unprepared to deal with life’s inevitable failures. Where once we could fall back on social capital—families, churches, friends—these no longer are strong enough to cushion our fall.
Citizenship is not a spectator sport.
In a world of civic networks, both formal and informal, our views are formed through interchange with friends and neighbors. Social capital allows political information to spread.
Sociologist Charles Horton Cooley, a firsthand witness to the changes, observed in 1912 that “in our own life the intimacy of the neighborhood has been broken up by the growth of an intricate mesh of wider contacts which leaves us strangers to people who live in the same house …diminishing our economic and spiritual community with our neighbors.”
Generally speaking, emigration devalues one’s social capital, for most of one’s social connections must be left behind. Thus immigrants rationally strive to conserve social capital. So-called chain migration, whereby immigrants from a given locale in the “old country” settle near one another in their new homeland, was and remains one common coping strategy.
Americans are right that the bonds of our communities have withered, and we are right to fear that this transformation has very real costs. The challenge for us, however, as it was for our predecessors moving from the Gilded Age into the Progressive Era, is not to grieve over social change, but to guide it.
Actions by individuals are not sufficient to restore community, but they are necessary.
