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Mike Wesch

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 - Cached
  • The public world has since become less urgent, more remote, and more tainted.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Mike Wesch on 26 May 09
     
    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.
Mike Wesch

Robert Putnam - Bowling Alone - Journal of Democracy 6:1 - 0 views

xroads.virginia.edu/...bowling.html

alone bowling community decline individualism putnam

shared by Mike Wesch on 30 May 08 - Cached
  • The technological transformation of leisure. There is reason to believe that deep-seated technological trends are radically "privatizing" or "individualizing" our use of leisure time and thus disrupting many opportunities for social-capital formation. The most obvious and probably the most powerful instrument of this revolution is television.
  • replacement of community-based enterprises by outposts of distant multinational firms
  • fewer marriages, more divorces
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  • Mobility, like frequent re-potting of plants, tends to disrupt root systems, and it takes time for an uprooted individual to put down new roots. It seems plausible that the automobile, suburbanization, and the movement to the Sun Belt have reduced the social rootedness of the average American,
  • It seems highly plausible that this social revolution should have reduced the time and energy available for building social capital.
  • These new mass-membership organizations are plainly of great political importance.
  • the only act of membership consists in writing a check for dues or perhaps occasionally reading a newsletter.
  • tertiary associations
Mike Wesch

Web ushers in age of ambient intimacy - Print Version - International Herald Tribune - 0 views

www.iht.com/...printfriendly.php

ambient intimacy thompson required

shared by Mike Wesch on 13 Jan 09 - Cached
Yann Leroux liked it
  • In essence, Facebook users didn't think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?
  • Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it "ambient awareness."
  • The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme
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  • taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like "a type of ESP," as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.
  • ad hoc, self-organizing socializing.
  • The Japanese sociologist Mizuko Ito first noticed it with mobile phones: lovers who were working in different cities would send text messages back and forth all night
  • You could also regard the growing popularity of online awareness as a reaction to social isolation, the modern American disconnectedness that Robert Putnam explored in his book "Bowling Alone."
  • "Things like Twitter have actually given me a much bigger social circle. I know more about more people than ever before."
  • Online awareness inevitably leads to a curious question: What sort of relationships are these? What does it mean to have hundreds of "friends" on Facebook? What kind of friends are they, anyway?
  • Dunbar noticed that ape groups tended to top out at 55 members. Since human brains were proportionally bigger, Dunbar figured that our maximum number of social connections would be similarly larger: about 150 on average
  • where their sociality had truly exploded was in their "weak ties"
  • "I outsource my entire life," she said. "I can solve any problem on Twitter in six minutes."
  • She also keeps a secondary Twitter account that is private and only for a much smaller circle of close friends and family — "My little secret," she said. It is a strategy many people told me they used: one account for their weak ties, one for their deeper relationships.)
  • Psychologists have long known that people can engage in "parasocial" relationships with fictional characters, like those on TV shows or in books, or with remote celebrities we read about in magazines. Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people.
  • Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society who has studied social media for 10 years, published a paper this spring arguing that awareness tools like News Feed might be creating a whole new class of relationships that are nearly parasocial — peripheral people in our network whose intimate details we follow closely online, even while they, like Angelina Jolie, are basically unaware we exist.
  • "These technologies allow you to be much more broadly friendly, but you just spread yourself much more thinly over many more people."
  • She needs to stay on Facebook just to monitor what's being said about her. This is a common complaint I heard, particularly from people in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared and have never lived as adults without online awareness. For them, participation isn't optional. If you don't dive in, other people will define who you are.
    • Mike Wesch
      Mike Wesch on 16 Feb 09
       
      like PR for the microcelebrity
  • "It's just like living in a village, where it's actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already," Tufekci said. "The current generation is never unconnected. They're never losing touch with their friends. So we're going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that's very new. It's just the 20th century."
  • Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early '90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.
  • "If anything, it's identity-constraining now," Tufekci told me. "You can't play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you.
  • "You know that old cartoon? 'On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog'? On the Internet today, everybody knows you're a dog! If you don't want people to know you're a dog, you'd better stay away from a keyboard."
  • Young people today are already developing an attitude toward their privacy that is simultaneously vigilant and laissez-faire. They curate their online personas as carefully as possible, knowing that everyone is watching — but they have also learned to shrug and accept the limits of what they can control.
  • Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you're feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It's like the Greek dictum to "know thyself," or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness.
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