Bowling Alone and the Virtual Community

Noah Barish

March 18, 2003

 

In his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam cautiously sidesteps computers and their relation to American community. Whether he likes it or not, the future of our social interactions and the landscape of the larger social community in America will be affected by the Internet and its byproduct, the virtual community. Yet throughout his exhaustively thorough discussion and analysis of American community, Putnam holds fast to the traditional definition of American community represented in the late 1960's and early 1970's America. And after journeying though the thousands of graphs, figures, and statistics commenting on all aspects daily life, one can discern a fundament change in the standard American community. The goal of this review is to place Putnam's analysis of the collapse of community in the context of an optimistic trend that envisions a new type of hybrid community. This community incorporates aspects of computer-mediated interactions and conventional social interactions to adapt to our need to stay connected around the world and at home.

            Before there were computers, there were communities. So it makes sense to understand Putnam's techniques for describing and evaluating the American community before we discuss them in relation to virtual communities.  His argument goes something like this:  A screwdriver is a valuable thing. It can help me build a house, or fix a car, and so it increases both my individual productivity and the collective productivity of my community.  Similarly, any social connections that I have, whether with members of my bowling team, friends from the bar, co-members of the local Rotary club, or congregants from my synagogue increase my personal productivity and the productivity of my group. Just as the screwdriver is a piece of physical capital, the social contacts that I maintain constitute "social capital" and are beneficial to both myself and bystanders in the community.

            Putnam shows that during the '50s and '60s, America was rich in social capital. Americans were idealistic, trusting, altruistic, and politically engaged. They bowled in leagues, participated in political campaigns, joined neighborhood associations, entertained guests, and regularly attended religious services. However, since the '60s America has seen a precipitous drop in all types of social connections: political, civic, religious, workplace, community service, and even informal social bonds. As Americans, we have become less connected and lost social capital individually, and as a society.

Putnam postulates that several factors in concert led to this collapse: increased pressures of time and money, sprawl and suburbanization, increased television watching, and a generational divide. But according to Putnam, we shouldn’t need pages of bar graphs and appendices full of statistics to convince us that our social capital has eroded. We, as readers, should be able to confirm from our own experiences whether Putnam has accurately portrayed the dissolution of social capital, and the consequent decline of American community.

While Putnam's argument and barrage of supporting evidence has succeeded in convincing some, there is a whole community of pundits, scholars, and ordinary citizens who might raise their voices, or perhaps keyboards, in disagreement. Take professor of Architecture and Planning at MIT, William Mitchell for example. In his book, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn he explains how the virtual world of computers linked through the Internet could be a locus of communication and creativity that compliments and even rivals the real world. While Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone worries that TV and electronic entertainment has replaced bars and cafes as social outlets, Mitchell wryly retorts, "The keyboard is my cafe" (1995, p. 7).

            If America's conventional communities are really withering, as Putnam believes, might it be possible that another type of community has emerged to fill the void? In their analysis of virtual communities “Net-Surfers Don’t Ride Alone: Virtual Communities as Communities” Barry Wellman and Milena Gulia point out that, "virtual communities provide possibilities for reversing the trend to less contact with community members because it is so easy to connect online with large numbers of people" (1999, pg. 356). Perhaps the recent deficiency in social connections described by Putnam will be reversed or slowed by connections facilitated through virtual chats, groups, and email. To evaluate that claim, we should first compare Putnam and Wellman’s understanding of social connection.

            Putnam uses a person's civic associations as an estimate of that person's social connectedness. The more meetings one attends, clubs one joins, or religious services one attends, the more one can be considered socially "connected". Informal social interactions also count as connections, even though they may not be dependent on an organization.  For example, hosting dinner parties, writing letters, and regularly stopping at a bar for a drink all augment the social capital of an individual. But Putnam's list of social capital enhancers spans so many everyday activities that there is no explanation of which specific properties of social connections serve to make them beneficial. In other words, how can we differentiate between more and less important types of social connections?

            To clarify a little, Putnam identifies "cooperative" forms of behavior, like serving on a committee or organizing a volunteering project. In contrast, he explains "expressive" forms of behavior as more individual activities, like writing letters to a congressman, or voting in an election. While "it takes two people to cooperate, it only takes one to express himself" (2000, p. 45). Nevertheless, both cooperative and expressive forms of civic activity have declined, with cooperative activities declining more sharply in the last 35 years. So one distinction exists between individual actions that demonstrate civic awareness and group activities that actually foster face-to-face interactions. If face-to-face interaction is not always required to maintain social capital, as in the cases of expressive civic behavior, then perhaps it is not as vital as Putnam first claims. Since we are now in the era of email, chat rooms, and online communities that lack any face-to-face component, we might want to know where these computer-mediated interactions fit into Putnam's rubric of social capital.

 In general, Putnam is very skeptical of all electronic entertainment because it isolates and privatizes American’s leisure time.  Electronic technology, "allows us to consume this hand-tailored entertainment in private, even utterly alone." (2000, p. 217). Here Putnam implies that electronic entertainment, especially television, promotes isolated and private interactions that take place only in the home, and curtails other social connections. This analysis seems reasonable when limited strictly to television, especially in light of evidence that Americans watch an average of four hours of television per day, and that television watching consumes 40 percent of the average American's free time (2000, p. 222).

With regards to the Internet, email, and other electronic communication, Putnam is more conflicted.  He notices that the Internet enables individuals who share very specific interests to find each other and communicate. Also, computer mediated interactions are more egalitarian and cost effective over long distances. However, Putnam worries that the loss of non-verbal information normally present in face-to-face conversations makes computer chat less robust, leading to decreases in trust, reciprocity, and solidarity. The bottom line for Putnam is that our real-world communities are suffering from dwindling social connection, and that the virtual communities currently available are not suitable replacements.

            Meanwhile, proponents of virtual communication have also noticed the decline of social capital. But instead of advocating a revitalization of close social connections through face-to-face civic engagement like Putnam, they predict that virtual communities will strengthen the weakened real-world social network.  Again, Wellman and Gulia write, "pundits worry that virtual community may not truly be community. These worriers are confusing the pastoralist myth of community for the reality. Community ties are already geographically dispersed, sparsely knit, connected heavily by telecommunications and specialized in content" (1999, p. 355). Interestingly, Wellman and Gulia notice some of the same properties of today's American communities as Putnam: lack of tight-knit groups and reliance on long distance communication. But while Putnam worries about these changes and calls for a return to the idealized American community of 40 years ago, Wellman and Gulia use the failings of current community to highlight improvements that virtual communities may bring in the future.

            What emerge are two complimentary analyses of the predicament of American community. One, epitomized by Bowling Alone, focuses on the decline of social capital, measured through formal and informal civic and social associations. The other, represented by “Net-Surfers Don’t Ride Alone”, notices the distance of community members and their resulting isolation. Instead of fighting the trends towards geographic isolation and infrequent face-to-face interactions, supporters of virtual communities embrace recent sociological approaches that discard the traditional notion of community defined in terms of physical space. Instead they claim that,  "communities do not have to be solitary groups of densely knit neighbors, but could also exist as social networks of kin, friends, and workmates who do not necessarily live in the same neighborhoods. It is not that the world is a global village, but as McLuhan (1965) originally said, one's village could span the globe" (Wellman and Gulia 1999, p. 333). This bold realignment of the structure and participants of a community contrasts with Putnam's characterization that communities should be evaluated based on political, religious, and community-based civic associations. Both authors claim to be describing our "social network", but they seem to disagree on what metrics should be used to evaluate the health of that network.

            Perhaps a foray into network science can help us bridge these disparate viewpoints. As social scientist, Robert Putnam avoids typical reductionist tactics in Bowling Alone. He never mentions people as "nodes" or their social connections as "links". Instead he demonstrates many statistical correlations between declines in various civic associations and their purported causes (pressures of time and money, TV, etc). But at the same time Putnam defines social capital functionally as the number of formal and informal civic associations any person has. In doing so, he implicitly identifies people as the important actors in communities and civic associations as the connections between those actors. Translating this viewpoint into network terminology would yield a social network where the overwhelmingly complex topology of our community is simplified into people connected by links consisting of civic associations like PTA's, bowling leagues, churches, and bridge groups.

            Would Putnam be satisfied with this abstracted formulation of American community? I bet that he wouldn't. Why not? For one, Putnam shows throughout Bowling Alone that certain civic associations tend to be predictive of other associations. For example, religious involvement is very strong predictor of community service and philanthropy, such that religious adherents are even more likely to volunteer or give money to activities not even sponsored by their congregation. Representing church membership as a simple link would not be able to show that and other more complicated correlations. Also, Putnam would likely disagree with the more fundamental assumption behind the network approach that by generalizing over all the nodes we can look for a larger order determining the network's behavior. Putnam takes special care to control for age, gender, and race effects in his data analysis, indicating that he sees undeniable and statistically important differences between types of people in a community. Finally, Putnam would likely invoke the practical impossibility of creating a complete topology of our social network. This thankless task was attempted when researchers produced a complete census that catalogued 22,000 informal networks and cliques in a community of 17,000 people (Fukuyama 1999). Whereas Putnam’s explication and analysis of community in Bowling Alone resists a network approach, the formulation of the social network suggested by Wellman and Gulia more gracefully accepts a network analysis. In such an analysis people are nodes linked by the traditional social connections favored by Putnam (clubs, bars, churches) as well as virtual connections such as email, AIM, and discussion groups.

In reality, there is not so much of a difference between Putnam and virtual community theorists, especially as we consider the implications of their claims. Putnam does not deny the existence of computer-mediated connections and virtual communities but he finds them to be significantly less important to maintenance of social capital than civic associations, which he identifies as the glue that binds the American community. On the other hand, Wellman and Gulia do not deny the existence of conventional social connections, but recognize (like Putnam) that they are more infrequent and less meaningful than in the past. Instead, they look forward to virtual interactions revitalizing the lackluster social interactions that already exist and creating new groups of enthusiasts who engage shared interests independent of geographical factors. Finally, they hope that computer mediated communication can assist people in switching rapidly and frequently between groups of ties, local and global, conventional and virtual (Wellman and Gulia 1999, p. 356). Both Putnam, and Wellman and Gulia are genuinely concerned about the health and future of our personal communities. But when it’s Tuesday night and the average American has to choose whether to go to the PTA meeting or to chat online, these recommendations for community revival will go largely unnoticed. Whether we choose the meeting or the chatting, we can't help but notice that feeling connected is an uphill struggle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References:

 

Fukuyama, Francis. 1999. “Social Capital and Civil Society” delivered at IMF Conference on Second Generation Reforms.

 

Mitchell, Williams, 1995. City of Bits: Space, Time, and the Infobahn.  Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

 

Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

 

Wellman, Barry and Gulia, Milena. 1999. “Net-Surfers Don’t Ride Alone: Virtual Communities as Communities” in Barry Wellman (Ed.), Networks in the Global Village: Life in Contemporary Communities, Westview, 1999.