America's Next Top Information Professional

Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community has been on my bedstand for about two years now. I’m reading it so slowly in part because it’s my bedtime book, but also because I’m enjoying it so much. His exploration of the decline in social capital is well-researched, clearly explained, and extremely genial.

I’m currently meandering through a chapter called “Against the tide? Small groups, social movements, and the net.” (As a disclaimer, the book was published in 2000, so all the references to AOL must be taken within their temporal context.) I haven’t really gotten deep into his examination of online communities, but the section on telecommunications starts with some telling anecdotes about the telephone and its effect on social life in America. Simply put, the propagators of the telephone failed to recognize some of the medium’s affordances. Putnam notes, for example, that phone companies were so certain that their main customers would be businesses that they discouraged using the telephone to socialize. Alexander Graham Bell himself thought the phone would be used much like the radio eventually was, to bring music into homes. No one imagined that the telephone would be a tool for plain old chatting and socialization. And yet, today it is an integral part of how families, friends, and acquaintances keep in touch. Putnam also points out that folks don’t generally meet new people on the phone, which is in marked contrast to online communications. I’ll post again as I keep reading.

(Incidentally, I don’t have a phone. Not a smart phone or a cell phone or even a landline. It wasn’t intentional, it just sort of happened. Generally I find it freeing, although there are disappointingly few payphones in service these days.)