Robert Putnam will speak at the University of Vermont on April 28, 2008, sharing a lecture titled “Civic Engagement in a Diverse and Changing America.”
Putnam’s Bowling Alone was a ground-breaker documenting the decline of many facets of American community life. Steve Yelvington writes about Putnam briefly this week… here.
Rich Gordon writes in more detail about Putnam’s more recent work, part of which Putnam summarizes as “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ – that is, to pull in like a turtle.”
UPDATE: Just got the following details…
2008 Mark L. Rosen Memorial Lecture
Robert D. Putnam
‘E Pluribus Unum: Rebuilding Community in a Diverse and Changing America’
Monday, April 28, 7 PM – Free and Open to the Public
Silver Maple Ballroom, Dudley H. Davis Center
Reception immediately following
Co-Sponsored by UVM Political Science Department and the Vermont Humanities Council
Professor Putnam is Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard, where he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses. He has written a dozen books, translated into seventeen languages, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and more recently Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a study of promising new forms of social connectedness. His previous book, Making Democracy Work, was praised by the Economist as “a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto and Weber.” Both Making Democracy work and Bowling Alone rank high among the most cited publications in the social sciences worldwide in the last several decades.
Some people outside of our pilot area may think that Front Porch Forum provides conventional online message boards for neighborhoods… not so. Here’s an example of a straight-forward web-based threaded message board from a Seattle neighborhood… click here. That’s a different animal.
Andy Sack, founding CEO of now-shuttered Judy’s Book, offers this advice for folks looking to get traction in the “local reviews and word of mouth referrals business”…
i) GET TO CRITICAL MASS
- Do this by limiting geography — stay in one geography for 3 years. Yes, 3 years. Do not expand geography for the first 36 months. Every successful online local business has been in one geography for 3 years.
- Do this by limiting the number of categories or professions you’re trying to get word of mouth on. Do not try and do the entire yellow pages. Choose at most five categories. I might suggest: restaurants, dentists, doctors, auto mechanics, and real estate.
- Do this by aggressive customer acquisition. Whatever your strategy for customer acquisition, get aggressive about. Do not sit in an ivory tower and expect to get to critical mass.
- Aggregate content from other places on the web so you can avoid the empty database problem
- Spend as little money as possible
ii) Go back to step i
VC Fred Wilson wrote this week about his Outside.in and Everyblock.com. The comments are interesting too. Fred wrote…
Techcrunch calls outside.in a competitor of EveryBlock. I think collaborator is more like it. It’s going to take more than one company to rebuild the local newspaper from the ground up.
Amen. Front Porch Forum is very different from either of these efforts, but plays in the same space. With 30% of our pilot city subscribing and a large percentage posting, we’re definitely well beyond just the heavy web users that dominate much of Web 2.0.
Occasionally Front Porch Forum is criticized for hosting moderated online forums. The critics worry about freedom of speech… giving every hothead unlimited space to vent seems to be some kind of gold standard.
While I recognize the immense value that our Bill of Rights grants us, especially freedom of speech, I also feel that the incivility found on many online spaces stifles free speech from those of us less willing to step down into that kind of environment.
So it was heartening today to read Charles C. Haynes piece on this subject. He writes, in part,…
I want people to read The Case for Civility: And Why Our Future Depends On It, a just-released book by Os Guinness — an influential Christian writer and public philosopher… Guinness urges us to focus on the urgent question that confronts the United States and the world: How do we live with our deepest differences, especially when those differences are religious and ideological?
The answer, he argues, begins with a rejection of extremes on both sides of the culture wars. Say no to a “sacred public square” — where one religion is privileged at the expense of others. And say no to a “naked public square” — where all mention of religion is removed from public life. Both are unconstitutional and unjust.
Guinness proposes an alternative vision of America, a vision consistent with both the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment: A “civil public square” where people of all faiths and none are equally free to enter public life on the basis on their convictions and where the government neither imposes nor inhibits religion.
Among other things, a civil public square requires forging a civic agreement to uphold the rights of others, even those with whom we deeply disagree, and a commitment to debate our differences with civility and respect.
Haynes goes on to say…
Civility doesn’t mean we all pretend to agree; it isn’t “niceness” that papers over disagreements. Differences matter — and we should debate them openly and freely. But how we debate, not only what we debate, also matters.
Civility, argues Guinness, doesn’t stifle debate or dissent. On the contrary, genuine civility “helps to strengthen debate because of its respect for the truth, yet all the while keeping debate constructive and within bounds because of its respect for the rights of other people and for the common good.”
A detailed posting about Smalltown.com‘s status today including its acquisition of Local2me.com… worth a read (comments too for a little fun).
While I’m uncertain if Smalltown’s approach has enough juice to keep people tuned in (it’s a souped up yellow pages with some social networking running through it), I am fascinated by their authentically local approach… town by town growth with real people on the ground.
Cameron Marlow, research scientist at Facebook, argues today against Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone thesis and the notion that more time spent commuting reduces a person’s social life. I think Cameron is suggesting that the more one commutes, the more time a person can spend on Facebook… and therefore said lucky soul will have a richer social life.
Perhaps I missed his point. It may be an MIT vs. Harvard thing. I don’t agree with all of Putnam’s conclusions, but I don’t doubt his data and the core of his analysis… Americans are less connected to the community where they live than they have in the past and this is not a good thing. I know that millions of kids (teens and 20s) and people in the tech industry use Facebook… but I just don’t see that as a replacement for a nation full of people richly engaged in local clubs, schools, churches, municipal government, civic organizations, sports, elections, charities, arts, etc.
Facebook is a game and local engagement is about building up the community in which you live. Apples and oranges.
“Facebook is just a game. That’s it, that’s all.” So says Sebastien Provencher. Thank goodness for the holidays and their tendency to break people out of their ruts and send them back home for a bit of grounding…
During the Holidays, I met with my friends and family multiple times and one topic of conversation that came up very often was Facebook. “What’s Facebook?” my mom would ask. “Why are people so fascinated with it” my brother-in-law would add. “It’s useless” or “it’s a waste of time” would also come up very often. The proof of the whole uselessness was the “poking” and the “sending my friends a virtual beer” examples. I tried explaining Facebook the way I’ve explained it many times in this blog but I quickly realized I was getting nowhere. My friends and family members that thought Facebook was useless wouldn’t change opinion even after I explained my big social media theories.
PreFacebook Life of a Techie
Yea these many years ago, I was a kid playing Pong on my family’s vintage black and white TV… I could and did play that thing all day (was it an Odyssey? I think it came from Sears). Then it was Atari… in color! Space Invaders, then Atroids, PacMan and beyond. And I owned a few of the first handheld “videogames”… football and car racing come to mind.
In college, I dragged along my old Atari into the dorm, risking and receiving a bit of ridicule, but soon enough we were engage in epic tournaments of some four player “breakout” type game where each guy tried to protect his king in his castle of bricks… alliances made around the beanbag chair on the shag carpet… daggers plunged into backs… great fun.
Then it was on to music… collecting other people’s music. My chosen low-budget approach was making audio tapes from borrowed or rented albums and recording off the radio (the college station played complete albums)… later CDs.
I was the first person I knew to buy a PDA… a Casio with a full keyboard… oh man I loved that thing. A buddy and I used its built-in spreadsheet software to track a cross-country road trip, among many other uses.
Sometime after grad school, I landed a job that included broadband access at my desk… wow! The web didn’t have much to offer yet, but email was incredible. I corresponded with every old friend and family member I could find that used email (and didn’t try to keep in touch with those who weren’t online).
While I typically worked conscientiously at this job, now I had a growing set of diversions at my fingertips… (1) computer games mysteriously living on my hard drive, (2) music I could play on my CD drive and research on the web, (3) contacts and calendar I could manage on my PDA, and (4) friends and family whom I could email. It’s a miracle that I accomplished as much as I did at that position.
Entertainment’s Place
Which brings me back to Sebastien’s point above about Facebook. I have a Facebook account and I’ve nosed around repeatedly… but for the life of me, I have no interest. Am I the only one not on board? Sometimes I think so… but then I have a moment like Sebastien’s homecoming and I realize that MOST people are not on or deeply into Facebook.
And when I look at my life now… it’s very different than when I was a teenager or in my 20s and spent a large amount of time on entertainment… games, music, socializing. Now, as a husband, father of young kids, son of aging parents, active member of my community (i.e., the place where I live my “first life”), and business owner… well, I’m in a very different place. I’m blessed that my “entertainment” is woven into the daily fabric of a rich and mostly balanced life… very different than emailing distant and fading old friends from a lonely cubicle.
Facebook offers next to nothing for me now. From age 13 to 33 I would have been all over it. But I don’t long for any online tools at this point. In fact, I want to spend less time interacting with and through technology and more with kids, neighbors, extended family and other people in my life. Front Porch Forum evolved out of this situation.
Follow the Kids, Dummy
One last point, many voices can be heard saying we should bow down to Facebook and other services that cater to youth… because obviously that’s the way of the future. Follow the children!
Hmm. I know lots of kids, teenagers and people in their 20s. Lots of wonderful young folks. They bring much to the discussion… but I’m not ready to abdicate my responsibility as an adult, parent and community leader in order to follow the lead of a gang of 17 year olds.
What a loss for all involved if my father had chucked what he was all about and spent his time with me playing Atari, collecting bootlegged Bruce Springsteen and Replacement albums, and trying to keep the connection alive to that guy named Bill from bio class years after we parted ways. No, he was busy doing real things of consequence with real people in real time and space.
And he (and other adults in my life) got me outside, involved in my community, working, to the family dinner table, etc. He didn’t forbid me my “screen time”… but he saw it as play time… not as the guiding principal around which his generation should mold our society.
A New Entertainment Industry Born
Hollywood, pop music, video games… all established entertainment industries. And now Facebook and others have created an industry out of a collection of things we’ve always done (social networking)… souped it all up considerably. I’m interested to see where this all goes, but not keen to jump in or give it too much weight. More and more Americans seem to be spending more and more time, money and emotional energy on entertainment… reminds me of what I recall learning of the latter days of another empire.
Hearing something from someone you know is powerful… increasingly so with every new website, cable TV channel, etc. vying for your attention. From a New York Times op-ed (thanks to Neal Polachek)…
Public trust in all kinds of communication is eroding, with a notable exception: word of mouth. A Roper poll found the number of people who said they get good ideas and information from television ads declined from 1977 to 2003, while the number who said the same about word of mouth increased by 25 percentage points.
Our mid-December survey of Iowa voters found 38 percent saying they trusted information provided by TV ads, while 69 percent trusted “comments from friends, relatives and colleagues.”
This jibes with our experience with Front Porch Forum, which a neighbor recently described as “word-of-mouth accelerated.”
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more