This is basically the thesis of the book I just linked. Its probably one of the more important politically oriented pieces I've ever read.
","id":12446373},{"author":"randycupertino","unix_time":1609203175,"html":"I've had Bowling Alone in my to-read Queue, however I think it might be way too depressing to read it in the middle of quarantine shelter-in-place! Would only emphasize the current dire straights!","id":25565304},{"author":"Aloha","unix_time":1476385674,"html":"I too can wholeheartedly recommend Coming Apart. I think Mr. Murrays synopsis of why we've had a splintering post WWII is great and probably pretty accurate. I just wish I knew an easy solution to fix it. But there is definitely a loss of shared values among Americans. I'd also recommend Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam as a starter on this topic.","id":12703214},{"author":"seneca","unix_time":1609198734,"html":"This is essentially what the book Bowling Alone is about. It's worth reading, along with the writer's other research.","id":25564684},{"author":"dublinben","unix_time":1627334829,"html":"The book Bowling Alone is about this trend of declining social capital and connection in the US, and was published in 2000. This is a modern phenomenon, which transcends any intensification during the last 18 months.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
","id":27965719},{"author":"ljw1001","unix_time":1480259077,"html":"TLDR: Get educated. Get Angry. Get Inspired. Take the time to read a great book.It's ironic that people are arguing that books are a waste of time - on HN.
There are certainly too many one-idea books, but there are also many extraordinary, irreplicable works: A Pattern Language, Thinking Fast and Slow, The Landscape of History, The Modern Firm, The Diffusion of Innovations, Bowling Alone, The Life You Can Save, And the Band Played On, and on and on.
","id":13049465},{"author":"joe_the_user","unix_time":1544330243,"html":"I should mention the letter seem to cover a spectrum of opinions, from doubting the problem to bemoaning it.Finding solid evidence that loneliness is increasing is a problem. I believe that it is but it is something that's simply hard to demonstrate. I think Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone was one of the most convincing arguments for the breakdown of community in the US but even that careful, well documented study had it's significant critics. Equally, one could point to the epidemic of suicides and opioids but again, one could frame doubts.
Anyone know other arguments.
","id":18639328},{"author":"Futurebot","unix_time":1385855932,"html":"A lot of this is covered in the excellent book \"The Cheating Culture\", which I recommend. \"Bowling Alone\", as the article mentions, covers the \"stay home and do your own thing\" part of it, but the economic system we've set up, I believe, is far a far stronger influence. We've set up a system that's dog-eat-dog, every man for himself, \"everything that happens to you is your own fault\", \"lift yourself up by your bootstraps\" and approaching hypercompetition. When it feels like you're one medical emergency, job loss, or bad debt away from homelessness, and have only pathetic (and painted as only for life's losers) safety nets there for you, you're out of necessity going to have to trust less. Add in the fact that many areas in this country have to deal with the daily threat of violence, and you get a toxic brew of distrust.This is sad for more than sentimental reasons, as the article mentions. The \"Economics of Trust\" is important for easy dealmaking, credit, and other things. More here:
http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters/software-programming-...
","id":6825309},{"author":"seneca","unix_time":1625613587,"html":"> because many of the functions that used to be performed by the family and community are now performed by businesses.I could see that being true. Do you mean businesses like Facebook and Twitter with their substitution for socializing?
I fully agree with the rest of your post. If you're interested in the subject, I would suggest reading Robert Putnam's research on Social Capital. Bowling Alone is a good synthesis (but I'd personally pass on his other books, which lean more toward polemics).
","id":27755584},{"author":"albertshin","unix_time":1558463671,"html":"Give Putnam's Bowling Alone a read if you haven't already","id":19973295},{"author":"space_fountain","unix_time":1611901365,"html":"> Obviously its going to be a bumpy ride as the whole of society suddenly has to learn to cope with so many views, learn the critical thinking it takes to grapple with false information, learn who is trustworthy and who is not etc. but in the long run we will be much much better off for it. This is merely what society wide growth looks like - its not going to be a straight line up. Pulling the plug on that is deeply, deeply wrong no matter how scary it seems.Why, what makes you think that nurturing more viewpoints leads better outcomes? You've just agreed with me that recent experience tends to say it doesn't. Why do you think that part of the adaptation to this new world we find ourselves in might not be a bit more control. I think exposure to views is fine, but it seems likely to me that social media doesn't just expose it converts. It gives people the impression that their niche viewpoint is widely supported and our brains are hardwired to go with consensus so when presented with one they hop on, but because it fragments that consensus we're left with hundreds of fractions each lapping up a nice densely connected graph of agreement.
On institutional failure. I agree that institutions have failed us. It's hard to look around and argue, but not all institutions and not all the way. The vaccine is getting out. The US is in top handful of countries in terms of distribution and well ahead in terms of total doses administered. While the death of the single provider household is partially to blame Bowling Alone a book about the decline in social capital in the US credits a lot of the fault with TV with some interesting natural experiments to back it up (it came out in 2000 so social media wasn't really a thing yet). Burning institutions to the ground basically never happens and is incredibly destructive when it does. Like great leap forward levels of destructive. I for one am not ready for that to happen.
","id":25954646},{"author":"tomsayer","unix_time":1583440816,"html":"(I'm Tom, Elizabeth's cofounder) - I agree with the societal reflection. Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam really speaks to this so well.While one of the changes we think about is that, the more positive one is that we now know SO much about how the young brain develops. We want parents to have access to that in a meaningful way. I often use the healthcare analogy; when someone wants support with their health (whether proactive wellness or reactive treatment) they'll often go to a doctor which is great (and why it's so bad when people don't have healthcare). Raising a child is of course different in many ways, but the internet is awash with generic, impersonal advice whereas we hope to bring back the human connection. We're excited to be able to bring this growing field of expertize to parents in a way that is deeply human at it's heart.
But yes... changes in communities are still depressing.
","id":22497927},{"author":"carpedimebagjoe","unix_time":1618340462,"html":"Ever since about the 1960's-1970's, it has been a slow, gradual frog boiling of American culture, institutions, government, community, and society. Look at all the neighbors and people in public who refuse or don't interact with each other. This was not the case 40 years ago. American socialization with strangers and neighbors was entirely different. Americans barely acknowledge the presence of one-another apart from pointing out microaggressions, espousing conspiracy theories, or berating someone for \"how so stupid they are for believing X.\" At some point, if people don't need or want each other, and don't benefit from the presence of one another, it stops being a civilization and starts being a prison colony where the inmates look to escape.Morris Berman discussed it to a degree in 2000.
Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam (2000) hinted to it. Heck, there are countries now with restaurants that cater to solo diners. That seems really depressing.
The late Chalmers Johnson predicted it convincingly in 2006 and during a few interviews.
America: The Farewell Tour by Chris Hedges (2018).
When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present by Nick Bryant (2021).
Most civilizations tend to last an average of 250 years until corruption and other factors causes their effective collapse. I think there is often a combined gradual decline and more sudden decline into effective collapse when civilizations lose their \"critical mass\" to maintain basic infrastructure and services. There are numerous failed states in the world that perpetually operate on the edge of this condition. Healthy civilizations needs lofty aspirations that don't lead to insolvency.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-08-10/four-reasons-c...
","id":26797358},{"author":"joe_the_user","unix_time":1524344777,"html":"I think a very inconvenient and ugly truth is slowly dawning on Facebook and society in general: connecting people at mass is bad. Facebook may go down in history as the next Big Tobacco or Big Fast Food that touted new innovation as a mass utopian relief, only to be later debunked as charlatan science.Wow, it is amazing to see how many people have come to this incredibly pessimistic view (I say this from other hn posts as well as this one).
It's been a long time since people lived in villages where each person's propensity for lying or not could be easily discerned. And it indeed took a while for people to reach the point that they could relate to strangers without either attacking them or allowing them to take advantage of them.
This progression has been necessary for the civilization that we know (for all it's goods and ills).
It's worth noting social media arose in the US at the point that a lot of immediate associations were decaying (see Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone). Social media has fullfilled a lot of the functions of things like the bowling leagues whose decline Putnam documents. Certainly social media has been problematic but it has essentially been where the socialize part of society is going (not to mention a lot the problems that the article and the parent imagines comes from social media in particular are actually problems of society in general). In anything, of the social medias, Facebook has done the most work in creating an interface to your friends in particular rather than the world at large (does the parent know he can keep non-friends from seeing or commenting on his feed? It might solve some of the problems he rails about.)
The thing is I suspect that the today's Facebook haters don't share an urge to return to the 100-person band societies that the primitivists I once knew idolize. Instead, I think they imagine a society where socializing will simply generally stop and people will give up the idea of friends entirely or that some small bubble they're can be exception to this.
","id":16893446},{"author":"oldgregg","unix_time":1290107949,"html":"Financial stability vs. love is a false dichotomy. You could also say that shift is from Community & Family Commitment to Emotionally Driven Radical Autonomy. Read Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam or look at what \"love\" marriages are doing in India.In the 60's everyone was casting off (often shitty) cultural restraints, but it was an overcorrection that was almost completely narcissistic. Suddenly you have no fault divorce and a culture that increasingly doesn't view that as a problem. Fast forward 40 years and my generation is largely self-serving paxil-popping automatons. :-)
Facebook brings us together but it ultimately doesn't make us really sacrifice for each other. That's an infinitely harder problem that technology will probably never solve.
","id":1918922},{"author":"dcolkitt","unix_time":1574884689,"html":"Social media and sensationalized news is definitely not helping. But I think the bigger issue is lack of community and close social bonds.Americans have significantly fewer close friends than previous generations[1]. They're much less likely to know their next-door neighbors[2]. Church attendance (which has traditionally been a major source of social capital) is way down, especially among young people[3]. Membership in civic organizations like the Masons and League of Women Voters has virtually disappeared among young people[4]. Adult sports leagues have sharply declining participation[5]. Even family reunions are disappearing[6].
These trends all started in the 1980s, well before social media and clickbait headlines. Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone in 2000. In a lot of ways I think modern Internet culture is a reaction, not a cause, of our social atomization and anomie. People are lonely and searching for human interaction in any form, even if it's just culture war bickering with strangers on the web.
Of course the problem is its a poor substitution for real-life relationships. Online interaction offers a temporarily relief of loneliness without conferring any of the long-term mental health benefits of actual social interaction.
[1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=550938...\n[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/daily-digit-americans-dont-kn...\n[3] https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christ...\n[4] https://prospect.org/infrastructure/strange-disappearance-ci...\n[5] https://www.athleticbusiness.com/Recreation/slow-pitch-softb...\n[6] https://www.wyso.org/post/family-reunions-tradition-decline
","id":21651446},{"author":"joe_the_user","unix_time":1547970443,"html":"Gates' claims are entirely concerning a world wide decrease in people living on \"pennies a day\". This is essentially just that group of people who lived outside the economy entirely now finally entering it. It really has nothing to do with the conditions of the average person already living in a money based economy.We have seen a decrease in US median income over the last however many years [1]. The way rent tends to be excluded from this underestimates the increase in impoverishment here imo also. There are also the frequent articles concerning how many people are $500/$1000/etc away disaster.
For increased social isolation, Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone is the classic (Note, Gates is neither an economist nor a sociologist. Putnam is a well recognized sociologist).
Note that the Average American's life span decreased for the second year in a row. This is notable since increases in medical technology tend to increase this life expectancy even when nothing else changes[2]. A big factor in the reduced life expectancy is what's termed \"deaths from despair\".
[1]https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/01/20/who-is-the-middle...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/21/health/us-life-expectancy-stu...
","id":18951753},{"author":"fernly","unix_time":1500595984,"html":"I find this perfectly credible because almost exactly the same conclusions were stated by Putnam in the classic _Bowling Alone_ [1]. A couple of pull-quotes from that,> Dozens of painstaking studies... have established beyond reasonable doubt that ... [t]he more integrated we are with our community, the less likely we are to experience colds, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, depression and premature death of all sorts...
> ... the positive contributions to health made by social integration and social support rival in strength the detrimental contributions of ... risk factors like ... smoking, obesity, elevated blood pressure, and physical inactivity.
> ...as a rough rule of thumb, if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half.
Putnam was surveying a large number of studies, not just the Harvard one.
[1] Putnam, Robert D, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community; https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Commu...
","id":14817224},{"author":"dcolkitt","unix_time":1576853900,"html":"One thing to note is that Robert Putnam wrote the original Bowling Alone essay in 1995. Well before most people in America even had Internet access.The trend of declining participation in religious organizations, civic organizations (like the League of Women Voters), fraternal societies (like the Elks or Masons), volunteer associations, labor unions, and sports leagues has been happening since at least the 1970s. Surveys of Americans have found a consistent decline in the number of self-reported close friends since as far back as the 1980s. Same for those who reported being friends with their neighbors. Indicators of social capital like the percent of people who donate blood have been falling since the 1970s.
The point is increasing levels of isolation and misanthropy is a manifestation of a broader trend towards declining social capital. And that trend has been ongoing for probably 50 years. Social media may have accelerated it, but I don't think it would have anywhere near the same impact if Facebook was introduced to the American society of 1960.
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