“bowling alone” phenomenon: that more and more people take up bowling as a form of
recreation, but fewer and fewer belong to organized leagues
> a metaphor for what urban life has become in contemporary middle-class America and for
millions of others worldwide living in an increasingly materialistic and solipsistic culture of
corporate work, obsessive consumption and overdetermined leisure.
Whereas cities once held out the promise of a wider, higher form of human community,
Putnam argues that contemporary urbanites now follow a path of less, not more, civic
engagement and that our collective stock of “social capital” - the meaningful human contacts
of all kinds that characterize true communities - is so dangerously eroded that it verges on
depletion.
In a massive follow-up study seeking the causes of this social disengagement, Putnam
discovered evidence of a negative correlation between racial and ethnic diversity and social
capital formation.
recreation, but fewer and fewer belong to organized leagues
> a metaphor for what urban life has become in contemporary middle-class America and for
millions of others worldwide living in an increasingly materialistic and solipsistic culture of
corporate work, obsessive consumption and overdetermined leisure.
Whereas cities once held out the promise of a wider, higher form of human community,
Putnam argues that contemporary urbanites now follow a path of less, not more, civic
engagement and that our collective stock of “social capital” - the meaningful human contacts
of all kinds that characterize true communities - is so dangerously eroded that it verges on
depletion.
In a massive follow-up study seeking the causes of this social disengagement, Putnam
discovered evidence of a negative correlation between racial and ethnic diversity and social
capital formation.
