The Public Vanishes - 0 views
www.princeton.edu/...r.Review.BowlingAlone-8-00.htm
review critique putnam community engagement participation pdf2009
shared by Mike Wesch on 26 May 09
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The public world has since become less urgent, more remote, and more tainted.
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face-to-face civic activity has dropped as groups with local chapters have given way to groups that count as members everyone who sends in a check in response to a direct-mail appeal.
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The important question is the share of income that Americans devote to charity; and by that measure, charitable giving has dropped sharply
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He acknowledges that there has been growth in support groups, but he insists that these are concerned with their own members' psychological well-being rather than with any civic interests
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The rise in volunteering among young people is just about the only data in Bowling Alone that provides a basis for hope about the future.
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One reason for the decline in face-to-face sociability may be that Americans can now sustain relationships with people whom they do not regularly see face-to-face.
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This difference in causal lineage between civic activity and other social activity seems critical to me, though Putnam seems to forget it when he summarizes his causal analysis a chapter later. There he bundles civic engagement together with sociability, and concludes that half of the decline in "social capital" is due to generational turnover, another quarter of it is due to television, and the remainder is the consequence of time pressures and money pressures and suburbanization.