Time to Read Bowling Alone

There was an op-ed in the Star Tribune today about the loneliness epidemic in the U.S. The writer was less alarmist than most, in the sense that he traced it back many decades instead of blaming it on recent factors. Serious but not alarmist, I would say.

One thing he reminded me of is that I've never read Robert Putnam's classic book Bowling Alone (published in 2000), and he provided a neat summary of the main factors Putnam identified as causing the decrease in social connection and networks. As listed in order by the op-ed writer, they are:

• more women going into the workforce
• people moving more
• economic and time pressures
• suburbanization 
• "technology ‘individualizing’ people’s leisure time"

Putnam, he said, put the most emphasis on the last factor, and of course that has only accelerated since he wrote the book. 

I don't know how Putnam wrote about the effect of suburbanization, but I would bet it had to do with the distance of houses from each other, the loss of front porches, and that sort of thing. I wonder how much he talked about the effect of having to drive everywhere to get anywhere or anything, and what is now called motornomativity. Cars are a technology that has literally driven individualization at the same time as media technology.

It's probably time for me to read the book. I thought it was older than it is: it came out not long after I left grad school, when Daughter Number Three-Point-One was pretty young. As we like to say, we were busy then. Less of an excuse now.