🎳🇺🇸 From bowling alleys to digital spaces: Rethinking American social capital

A deep dive into Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone

On this July 4th weekend, I’m reflecting on one of the best things about America: dense, interwoven civic associations are deep in our DNA. From the beginning, our nation was full of clubs of all kinds, organized around anything else you can think of. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America in 1840:

Americans group together to hold fêtes, found seminaries, build inns, construct churches, distribute books, dispatch missionaries to the antipodes. They establish hospitals, prisons, schools by the same method. Finally, if they wish to highlight a truth or develop an opinion by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association.

But is this still true? Sociologist Robert Putnam has, in several books, charted the rise and fall of American social capital: essentially a measure of the richness and depth of the civic infrastructure of a community. His classic text, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, now more than 20 years old, brought the idea that American social capital has declined into the mainstream.

Below, former New_ Public Research Fellow Serena Chao takes on Bowling Alone and sets out to answer a number of questions: What’s so damaging about a decline of social capital? How does social media figure into this? How can we act to grow America’s social capital? My hunch is that finding answers to these questions will be really important as we dig further into developing local digital spaces that really help build social trust and belonging for communities.

–Josh Kramer, New_ Public Head of Editorial

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Revitalizing our social capital

When you wander around your neighborhood block, what memories come to mind? Do you think about the yard sales that pop up each summer? How about the familiar faces you smile at when you’re on your regular running route? Have you been to a bowling night sponsored by a local civic group? These are the little things, amidst the organized community events and volunteering engagements, that build our social capital.

Social capital, defined by Putnam, is the “connections among individuals — social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.” In Bowling Alone, Putnam made a strong case for a correlation between thriving, healthy communities and higher levels of social capital. States with more social capital have higher levels of economic growth, public health, tax compliance, government legitimacy, life expectancy, and student achievement, to name a few. People living in areas with less social capital often find themselves “bowling alone,” so to speak.

Putnam describes the trend of social capital over time as an inverted U-curve — “starting the [20th] century at nearly the same low we experience today, growing until roughly the mid-1960s, then declining again.” Nearly a quarter century later, social capital has declined further, and this decline is felt widely today in many forms, including rising levels of social distrust and the “friendship dip.” Loneliness is so widespread that the Surgeon General has deemed it a public health crisis.

Why does a decline in social capital matter?

As Putnam describes in his 2020 book The Upswing, America was on the right track in the first half of the 20th century — growing social capital amidst urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. Putnam argues that starting in the 1960s, a culmination of societal factors bubbled up into a deeper culture of individualism, further away from the communal values and rich civic life of the first half of the century.

The bulk of Bowling Alone traces the decline of American social capital through a web of contributing factors, looking for the largest culprits. Putnam identifies these as generational change, pressures of time and money, television, and sprawl. Each of these are key explanations, but they don’t capture the full complexity of this decline.

The changing dynamics of the American economy — from corporate consolidation to the decline of private unions — as well as dramatic changes in immigration policy, are noticeably missing from Putnam’s story. Critiques of Bowling Alone also highlight two of his biases: over-indexing on the effect of generational change and overemphasizing the effects of participating in local clubs. But regardless of how we attribute the blame for social capital’s decline, Putnam’s core thesis is indisputable: it has declined, and this has cost us dearly.

According to Putnam, the more we prioritize our private bubbles over public life, the more we disconnect from our local surroundings. This has weakened American democracy. Fewer people are engaged in politics, and those who do are often at the political poles. With less social capital, our neighborhoods are connected by fewer informal, reciprocal ties between neighbors, which makes them less resilient. To solve neighborhood concerns, we often default to formal avenues over informal interactions, like reporting noise to city officials rather than knocking on a neighbor’s door. This extends to our appetite for solutions from the gig economy, including hiring help through TaskRabbit instead of asking a neighbor for a favor.

How can social media uplift our social capital?

Twenty years later, Putnam wrote a new Afterword for Bowling Alone that reckons with how the social internet fits in with the decline of social capital. “Can virtual ties replace the in-person ties emphasized in Bowling Alone?” Putnam asks.

When the telephone proliferated throughout American households in the 1950s, it did not inherently increase social capital. Rather, it was a tool of convenience for upkeeping relationships. This echoes the early days and platforms of social media, when we used Facebook timelines and MSN Messenger to chat with our closest ties. But the scope of these virtual ties has since expanded greatly.

Today’s social media platforms bring a large, global population together, but too often, as Putnam writes, “our devices allow the illusion of connection without the demands of friendship and conversation.” Social media often makes us feel like we’re “posting alone” rather than part of a larger society. And as New_ Public has written about often, the companies that own these spaces are primarily motivated by profit, rather than facilitating meaningful human connection.

We can have (and need) a spectrum of different kinds of groups, clubs, and spaces — in-person, virtual, or a combination of both — that collectively spark an inflection point in growing American social capital. 

Can we reverse the decline?

Bowling Alone is not a book of solutions, but it has documented — and popularized an understanding of — how severely our communities have changed due to the continued decline in social capital in the United States. In the years since its release, many have accepted the book’s challenge, “can we restore America’s social capital?”

Weave: The Social Fabric Project at the Aspen Institute, Denver’s Warm Cookies of the Revolution, and The Trust for Civic Life are just the tip of an iceberg of social change. Many activists, researchers, and community leaders are working hard on building social trust in American communities, with a mix of off- and online approaches and practices. We need all the solutions we can find.  

And in terms of the internet, Putnam is right: the dominant social media platforms have enabled us to make connections across the world, but they aren’t helping us connect to each other within our communities. If we want social media to cultivate social capital, we need to think of these platforms as places to be stewarded rather than media to be consumed. How can we use tech to develop more informal place-based ties? As we spend more of our time online, how can we make virtual space for social capital to form?

New_ Public’s vision, as Eli wrote in the newsletter last month, is focused on strengthening local forums and groups already embedded in communities. By empowering community stewards who are already intentionally supporting and caring for these spaces, we hope to help spur the creation of social capital throughout the US.

We need to continue this momentum. We ought to be optimistic about the ways we can restore America’s social capital, through our public spaces — both physical and virtual — and as neighbors grounded in the places we live, work, and play. 

–Serena Chao

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Thanks Serena!

Logging off for some chillin’ and grillin’,

–Josh