Too seldom is it considered that the character of social life could be different than it is today. Far too many people act as if the social status quo were as natural as the daily rise of the sun, as if changes to the practice of community were inexorably imposed on humanity by technology rather than enacted by people through technologies. Network society living is too often treated as either a blessing to celebrate or a curse to bear rather than something to be reconstructed. While the occasional magazine article sounds the alarm about Facebook potentially “making us lonely,”1 popular discourse seems permeated by professional social analysts assuring citizens that technological changes to social life are nothing to worry about. Sociologist Keith Hampton, for instance, has maintained that the “constant feed of status updates and digital photos from our online social circles is the modern front porch,” insisting that “those we depend on are more accessible today than at any point since we lived in small, village-like settlements.”2 According to Internet scholar Yochai Benkler, “Social norms and software coevolving to offer new, more stable, and richer contexts for forging new relationships beyond those that in the past have been the focus of our social lives.”3
We? A more stable and richer context for our social lives? To anyone who has ever felt lonelier after checking Facebook than before, such claims read like bromides from Dr. Pangloss. They seem to assume away significant problems with contemporary social belonging, implying that “we” are all on our way to living in the best of all possible worlds. Anyone who has enjoyed a summer day on the front porch with friends and neighbors, however, would likely not equate it with social media. Try getting a Facebook status update to help move a couch or stay for dinner. It is doubtful that people who are dissatisfied with the current level of community in their lives take such proclamations seriously. To them, Benkler’s and Hampton’s paeans to digitally enabled social networks read like reverse adaptation: they appear to call for citizens to adapt their expectations for social life to what dominant technologies can offer rather than demand that they be refashioned to better enable other ways of being and relating.4 The first task of this book is to challenge the common refrain that people ought to stop worrying and learn to love social networks: What is lost and who loses in the shift toward network-based social life?
If social media and personal communication devices have actually delivered on the social wonders promised by their champions, one would not know it from the available data. One study created a stir when its authors calculated that the number of people having no close confidants had tripled over a few decades.5 Critics have since argued that the study’s results were erroneous, revising the estimate to a more modest fifty percent increase.6 Accurately measuring such changes, in any case, is hindered by the fact that people’s interpretation of what it means to have a confidant shifts over time and in response to technological changes. On the other hand, a 400 percent increase between 1988 and 2008 in citizens taking antidepressants seems to suggest that at least some people may not be receiving the kind of belonging, intimacy, or psychosocial support they need.7 Indeed, a recent survey found that over a third of American adults over forty-five meet the criteria for “lonely” on UCLA’s loneliness scale.8
Although it is unclear to what extent people may be lonelier today than in the past, most scholars recognize that social activity has become increasingly individualized and fragmented; that is, people experience their sociality more and more often through diffuse, atomistic networks of specialized social ties rather than in bounded, densely woven, place-rooted, and economically, politically, and morally rich communities. They experience social connection as individuals accessing and moving through technological networks rather than as an almost indelible feature of everyday life. Individuals more often correspond via Facebook or attend ad-hoc “meetups” than join local associations or frequent neighborhood cafés. Social ties are more diffuse and segregated; community appears more as a friends list than as a place to which one can point. Technically Together offers a critical inquiry into this shift: How do technological arrangements make certain facets of traditional community life more difficult to realize? Which technologies help reinforce the social status quo? What technical, political, economic, and cultural changes would enable citizens to weave their fragmented, diffuse social networks back together into place-rooted communities?
The slide toward more individualistic forms of social connection has been characterized by a number of sociologists. Robert Bellah and his coauthors, for example, found that Americans have become increasingly incapable of coherently describing or understanding their social obligations.9 An ever more dominant language of individualism leaves people unable to comprehend their connections outside the logic of utilitarian self-interest or expressive self-realization. These scholars worried that such linguistic changes would weaken the practices of commitment that sustain marriages, families, and communities, because such practices can seem irrational when analyzed starkly in terms of short-term personal costs and benefits. Group belonging, moreover, has been increasingly sought through lifestyle enclaves, groups organized around shared personal interest rather than in terms of broader collective goals or responsibilities.
Robert Putnam’s impressively thorough Bowling Alone painted a similar picture of twentieth-century communality.10 Although sometimes mischaracterized as claiming that Americans had become totally socially isolated, Putnam actually analyzed the decline of certain forms of sociality, not the quantity of social ties. Americans are not really “bowling alone” so much as decreasingly doing so in local bowling leagues. They instead bowl sporadically with different sets of friends. Moreover, they are less likely to spend time with neighbors, entertain at home, join clubs or unions, or participate in local politics. Putnam’s work systematically charted the increased social fragmentation of multiple spheres of daily life and pointed to suburbanization, broader cultural changes, and television as contributing factors.
General levels of social trust, neighboring, and membership in formal organizations have continued to decline since Putnam’s book was published in 2000; while volunteering and joining increased among young Americans somewhat after 9/11, this uptick in civic activity has occurred primarily among upper-middle-class whites.11 At any rate, the slide away from the regular, socially leveling interactions characterizing local associational life and toward less coherent and more fragmented social networks signals the demise of an important form of communality. Journalist Marc Dunkelman describes this as a loss of the “middle ring” of social life. While people remain enmeshed in an inner ring of intimate bonds and connected to an outer ring of online and distant ties, neighborhood- and township-level relationships are in decline.12
The social network paradigm of community studies, largely developed by sociologist Barry Wellman, has confirmed this shift in social structure toward networked individualism. From his 1970s studies of Toronto social networks to more recent collaborations, Wellman has depicted social ties as increasingly geographically dispersed, more loosely knit, more specialized, and increasingly based on shared personal interests.13 Social belonging less frequently occurs through local, dense, and interweaving webs of bonds. Networked individualist connections are created and maintained only insofar as they support the bilateral exchange of some element of social support rather than because of local solidarity or the need to sustain a club, an association, or a neighborhood. A networked individualist maintains certain connections for a shoulder to cry on, others for going out on the town, and still others for professional advancement, but rarely do these connections intersect or even know of one another.
Social network theorists typically part ways with scholars like Bellah and Putnam, insisting that there is little reason to worry about networked individualization. They depict the increased bypassing of intermediate ties and scales of organization via networks as an evolution of community—neither good nor bad—rather than a decline. A case in point is Claude Fischer, who has maintained that not much has changed in the last forty years concerning American’s personal connections.14 Using national survey data, he demonstrated that neighboring and entertaining at home has been replaced with going out with friends or chatting online. Family time likewise happens less around the dinner table; members increasingly interact with one another while driving to appointments or activities. As insightful as Fischer’s research is, it does not really answer the concerns posed by Putnam and Bellah. Its narrow focus gives the impression that qualitative changes in how people spend time with each other can be ignored as long as the quantity of social contact stays roughly the same.
Other scholars have been even more up front with their optimism, appearing to depict networking as a nearly unalloyed improvement compared with older forms of social life. Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman, for instance, have extoled networked individualism’s virtues as a revolutionary “social operating system.” They argued that networked community “offers more freedom to individuals than people experienced in the past because now they have more room to maneuver and more capacity to act on their own.”15 Similarly, sociologist Eric Klinenberg has described living alone and without strong social obligations as a modern virtue, for it “liberates us from the constraints of a domestic partner’s needs and demands, and permits us to focus on ourselves … [and] helps us discover who we are, as well as what gives us meaning and purpose.”16 This response to a decline in the community life described by Putnam and Bellah amounts to saying “good riddance”—a sentiment increasingly embraced, by Americans in particular, over the past decades.
Why are the consequences of qualitative changes in the practice of togetherness so quickly downplayed when psychological data indicate that Americans are becoming more narcissistic, self-centered in their moral reasoning, dismissive of intimate relationships, and less empathic?17 Why is it that many social network scholars appear to presume that they know what is socially liberating for the rest of technological civilization? Ideas like liberty, meaning, and purpose are matters of value, and hence politics, rather than ostensibly objective social facts. What freedom means, to take one example, has been debated by political theorists for millennia and is inexorably conditioned and constrained by the culture one grows up in. It is not something whose true nature can be discovered through a social survey or ethnographic study. Other highly value-laden terms, including community, are no different. Although social network analysis can help elucidate the various ways through which people might seek belonging, it cannot determine what belonging ought to mean to them. Concerning the latter question, social network scholars have no special epistemological authority. In making grand universalizing statements about what community is and what gives contemporary persons meaning, one risks assuming away these issues’ political and moral complexities. Such questions inevitably evoke disagreement about the character of the good life and how it should be provided.
The aim of this book is to recast the question concerning community and technology as a political one. Rather than believing that community is something discovered, I frame it as something to be debated and shaped through political action: Who benefits from which technologically enabled forms of togetherness? Which ways of providing social belonging are desirable? Which technologies enable and which constrain various types of interpersonal life? The widespread neglect of such questions virtually guarantees that citizens remain passive observers to large-scale alterations to social life rather than agents of change.
My analysis begins with a rejection of technological fatalism. Carolyn Marvin once pointed out that people too frequently presume that “new technologies will make the world more nearly what it was meant to be all along.”18 Technologically driven changes to community life are too often portrayed as inevitable stops on the grand railroad of progress toward modernity, for better or worse. Rather than simply lament or celebrate where contemporary social life seems to be headed, I focus on how it could be otherwise. How could technological societies better enable thicker forms of togetherness more of the time?
While there is nothing preordained about the character of “modern” living, most people probably feel as individually helpless in changing the social status quo as they do in attempting to eliminate their carbon footprint. Practices such as networked individualism appear to be virtually locked in to the fabric of everyday life.19 Yet, technological changes only seem unalterable because they are supported by a whole host of supportive policies, economic arrangements, and entrenched patterns of thought. What sociotechnical factors render alternative modes of belonging more difficult to enact? At the same time, major social and technical upheavals have almost never been the product of a conscious and foresighted steering of technology. Societies typically sleepwalk through the process of sociotechnical evolution.20 Rarely, if ever, has the question “What might be the effects on social life?” guided decision making regarding which technologies ought to get funded, designed, and deployed. How could citizens more effectively govern technological change with respect to its potential effects on togetherness?
The fact that networked individualism is becoming ever more entrenched into the sociotechnical context of everyday life without conscious, collective deliberation is important not just because it is a clear violation of democratic principles but because it affects people’s welfare. What I call thick community is associated with several aspects of physiological, psychological, and cultural well-being.21 People who are well integrated into social communities or localities high in social capital tend to live longer, suffer fewer psychological problems, and enjoy greater political democracy, among other benefits. This may be because communal integration helps prevent a sense of loneliness, alienation, or purposelessness. In any case, the feeling that contemporary societies are unwell probably drives the ongoing perception that community is in decline, despite the fact that it lives on, in some sense of the word, via fragmented social networks.
At the same time, many environmental scholars have suggested that growing resource scarcity and global ecological disruption are crises that technological societies are unlikely to innovate their way out of.22 Rather, adequately adapting to or steering away from the brink of global economic and ecological catastrophe will require making significant sociocultural changes, including shifting toward more communitarian economies and social formations.
Moreover, political thinkers have argued that realizing freer and more just societies lies in sustaining diverse and strongly democratic communities.23 Sociologist Robert Nisbet long ago found that the emergence of European totalitarianism paralleled the dismantling of social organizations lying at scales between that of the state and that of individuals, weakening what had provided a countervailing force to state power.24 In fact, Nazi leaders consolidated and assured their control partly through outlawing independent labor unions, mutual aid organizations, and other civil associations that might have offered fertile ground for the seeds of resistance to an increasingly intrusive centralized state. The threat to free and open societies today, of course, is no longer outright totalitarianism, at least outside a few embattled countries. Nevertheless, the less brutal but still significant public harms produced by unchecked corporate power persist partly because of the relative weakness of civil society as a countervailing political force. The pervasive cultural overvaluation of individual liberty (especially economic) at the expense of democracy, coupled with the individuation of social life, leaves citizens poorly equipped to defeat better organized and funded elites in political conflict. The fact that most people’s idea of politics is limited to largely individual and insubstantial efforts such as occasional visits to the election booth, slightly more conscious and circumspective consumer purchases, and/or forms of online “clicktivism” both signals and reinforces the decline of the democratic freedoms achievable through a communitarian civil society.25
Regardless, one need not go so far to appreciate the value of thicker forms of social connection. Many of those reading this book might already wish that their environment were more conducive to getting to know neighbors, facilitating leisurely socializing with friends, and engendering a sense of belonging to locality. It is not uncommon to hear citizens lament the extent to which their social lives are driven by sporadic meetups with fragmented friend groups and countless hours surfing online social networks. For some, these are imperfect and short-lasting substitutes for thicker forms of communal belonging (see box 1.1).
In Networked, Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman presented Linda Evans as the embodiment of learning to thrive in a networked world. Depressed and only recently back at work after her divorce, Linda successfully operated a range of online and offline social networks to put her life back together. She joined a support group at her church, eventually developing a deep online relationship with another recent divorcé named John. She advanced herself professionally and financially through online degree programs and by accessing Internet resources on investing. Moreover, Linda started running an online support group for people with myasthenia gravis, finding meaning in helping those anxious about their future or rendered housebound by illness. Rainie and Wellman depicted people like Linda as having the right “combination of talent, energy, altruism, social acuity, and tech-savviness” necessary to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and succeed socially, personally, and professionally as networked individuals.26
The BBC documentary The Age of Loneliness complicates and challenges this view of social belonging in a networked age. Interviewees included a college student named Isabel, a more than one hundred-year old woman named Olive, and people from nearly every life stage in between. They did not see themselves as “thriving” in an age of networked living. On the contrary, most described themselves as merely coping. Interviewees made ample use of social networks: volunteering, organizing weekly mom’s meetings through Facebook, Internet dating, and attending computer classes, but doing so yielded mixed results, and most remained lonely. For Isabel and a divorcée named Kylie, online networking exacerbated feelings of loneliness. They perceived status updates and profiles as other people’s “highlights reels,” carefully curated depictions of fun and excitement that make others feel more alone in comparison. To Jane, a single woman in her forties, online dating sites mainly provided new opportunities for rejection. Others found it difficult to make and sustain new friendships, expressing the wish that someone would just stop by regularly to chat; however, one “can’t make people come and ring the [door]bell.” Emily, a stay-at-home mother who relied on supermarket cashiers for her daily social contact, lamented lacking a local extended family network like the one that had supported her own mother.27
The experiences depicted in The Age of Loneliness doubtlessly result from a combination of the interviewees’ circumstances and their personal characteristics, such as mental illness. Nevertheless, in light of their struggles, the growing expectation that individuals be solely responsible for cultivating their own social communities starts to seem unfair, if not uncaring. Descriptions of winners such as Linda Evans, on the other hand, begin to read like digital age “rags to riches” stories. Similar to the tales told about immigrants who arrived in America with only a dollar in their pocket and became wealthy by the sweat of their brow, winners’ stories imply that the resources for success are simply there for the taking. Failure to amass either wealth or social ties becomes framed as a personal, not a societal, failing.
Despite the importance of social belonging to people’s welfare, topics such as community have rarely been the target of science and technology studies (STS) research. The examination of how the technical is sociopolitically shaped tends to overshadow questions regarding the consequences of sociotechnical change for the average Joe or Jane. Although Anique Hommels has well illustrated how sociopolitical forces render some urban infrastructures obdurate or difficult to change, her analysis devoted little attention to the forms of life that such infrastructural obduracies promote or inhibit.28 Sociologist Thomas Gieryn echoed what urban theorists from Jane Jacobs to Kevin Lynch have argued for decades when observing that “buildings stabilize social life”29 but did not ask which buildings were up to the task of stabilizing what kinds of social lives. Additionally, “sexy” or esoteric technologies, like synthetic biology or nineteenth-century bicycles often receive equal—if not more—attention as the more mundane technologies shaping everyday life. One of the goals of this book is to demonstrate what technology scholarship aimed at addressing the problems of ordinary people could look like.
My intention is to provide sociopolitical analysis for the benefit of those who seek to reconstruct contemporary societies to better provide more multifaceted and vibrant forms of belonging. As such, my goal is not really to convince staunch advocates of networked individualism that they are misguided, though I hope the following analysis helps some of them recognize how community life is hollowed out if marketlike networking crowds out other modes of being. Rather, my purpose is to help aspiring communitarians—as well as those not yet sure of how they feel about networked sociality—better see how technological societies stymie the development of alternative forms of togetherness and how they might begin to strategize toward a different future.30 I do not simply catalog the problems technological developments have created for social life but also examine the possibilities for realizing sociotechnical change.
These features—and others—make Technically Together atypical within the field of STS. My focus on the consequences of technologies for people’s subjective experience and well-being differs from standard social constructivist approaches, which integrate those experiences mainly insofar as they explain scientific fact production or technological innovation. Paying attention to the built environment, despite its importance for everyday life, is also unusual for STS. I could count no more than a handful of papers focusing on urban technologies in the field’s main journals in the last five years, though talks regarding urban life at the STS annual conference have become more common since 2014. Urban technologies have historically been left to planning and architectural scholars to analyze. Likewise STS scholarship rarely attempts to imagine or strategize toward alternative futures. Indeed, emphasis is usually placed on constructing histories of change and on mapping the politics of contemporary controversies. Normative recommendations are usually made in the final chapter, if at all. The tendency to shy away from prescribing what could be done and to focus on describing what has already happened means technology scholarship provides more academic benefits vis-à-vis theory building than practical gains. STS research is too often of limited helpfulness to anyone not holding a university faculty position.
In the next chapter, I continue my analysis of the networked sociality paradigm for understanding the interrelation between community and technology. What are the politics of networked individualism as both a phenomenon and a theory? I show that the practice of networked individuals entails both winners and losers, especially in how belonging shifts from being a public good to a private responsibility. Such politics, however, have generally received little academic attention. I partly attribute this lack of attention to how technological change is conceptualized in texts by network scholars. Although they recognize that the validity of networked individualism as a theory of community is ensured by technological changes that help establish it as a dominant social phenomenon, they tend to underemphasize how such changes are sociopolitically accomplished. As a result, Wellman and other network sociologists can come across as justifying or normalizing technological changes to sociality as natural or inevitable, limiting the scope of debate to exclude the imagining of alternatives to the status quo. Such a portrayal is not simply the result of dispassionate social scientific analysis but rather amounts to an implicit form of political advocacy.
In chapter 3, I develop an improved framework for understanding community. Too often, the concept is reduced to a single variable, such as social networking or the sense of belonging. Yet, approached differently, the corpus of research on social connection appears as a rich trove revealing community’s multiple facets and manifestations: symbolic and rhetorical markers of collectiveness, civic self-governance, and the skills and dispositions needed for longer-term social commitments, among others. This approach enables the characterization of different instantiations of social phenomena as thick or thin with respect to the multiple dimensions of community, allowing for a more nuanced analysis of how communitarian practices are affected by sociotechnical change. I describe how many instances of contemporary communality, including the phenomenon of networked individualism, are relatively thin in comparison to what has existed at other times and places and what could exist in future technological societies. Finally, the framework breaks away from stale arguments that reduce the debate to a comparison between idealized and mostly hypothetical visions of the ostensibly intolerant rural hamlet and the purportedly liberating but anonymous city. Social belonging is a more multifaceted and diverse category of phenomena than such dichotomizing views presume. Even though I strongly criticize networked individualism, my purpose is not to present it as the opposite of community but as a genuine instantiation of it, albeit one that I find to be relatively thin in regard to several dimensions of communality.
In chapters 4 through 6, I extend to the phenomenon of community political philosopher Langdon Winner’s observation that “different ideas of social and political life entail different technologies for their realization.”31 Which technologies help to naturalize networked individualism? What features of different artifacts, techniques, systems, spaces, organizations, and infrastructures make them more amenable to different dimensions of thick community? I subsume a far broader range of objects under the category of technology than is typical in common understandings of the word. A narrow focus on devices and tools can blind one to the equally important and supportive role of techniques, urban form, organizations, and large-scale infrastructures. Strategies for sleep-training infants and structures for organizing energy provision or youth sports are as technological as cell phones and neighborhood streets. The following are among the questions raised regarding potentially communitarian technologies: Does it gather social activity in a place or promote diffusion? Does it encourage the negotiation of conflict or its avoidance? Can it help evoke the sense that one exists within a coherent social group? Is it premised on sharing or on individualistic consumption? Does it draw users into webs of material and/or economic interdependence? Through this analysis, I illustrate that the usual suspects (e.g., television and suburbia) are far from the only or even the most significantly anti- or thinly communal technologies.
In chapters 7 through 9, I reconsider the same technologies from a very different angle. What are the barriers to constructing and reconstructing technologies to be more supportive of thick community? In other words, what contributes to the obduracy, or resistance to change, of contemporary social patterns, and how could that obduracy be lessened? Rather than pretend that individuals have the capacity to rearrange their inherited technological contexts to accommodate the type of togetherness they desire, I outline some of the main social, political, economic, and cultural factors that make such efforts difficult. For instance, if the “cry-it-out” method for sleep training infants is a psychosocial technology that helps ingrain individualistic beliefs and dispositions, then determining what barriers stand in the way of more relationally communal sleep training should matter to would-be communitarians. The feasibility of alternative sleep-training methods depends on the time and scheduling constraints placed on contemporary parents. There are sociotechnical reasons why “crying it out” might appear to be the only practical approach for the average parent. For competing strategies to become viable, workplaces would need to become much more flexible regarding alternative scheduling, and other institutions would need to provide new parents with other kinds of support.
The most significant barrier to thicker communities, however, may be ignorance, for an increasing fraction of people have had little experience with thicker forms of belonging. Their understandings will be limited by generational amnesia as well as by the parallel rise in social anxieties. Indeed, more and more people view social interactions and obligations as a source of trepidation, with many younger people preferring to text rather than phone friends or to order pizza from a website so as to avoid talking with a stranger.32 Again, many peoples’ lessened expectations and habits regarding social life are often the result of their “reverse adaptation” to the life patterns their technological context best supports. I hope this book can provoke both citizens and scholars to reconsider taken-for-granted stories and supposed truisms that currently constrain thinking about what community could mean.
In chapter 10, I examine how technologies that risk harm to thick community could be more adroitly governed. What changes in decision making concerning technological development could permit a more conscious and reflective approach to large-scale sociotechnical changes to social life? This chapter extends research regarding how to productively cope with the uncertainties and complexities present in novel sociotechnical undertakings. Political scientists have found that decision makers are able to “avert catastrophe” insofar as they proceed carefully and in light of experience—that is, through “intelligent trial-and-error.”33 Most studies have applied this framework to technologies that pose significant financial, environmental, and human health risks. How might it be applied to emerging technologies that could negatively affect the practice of community, namely driverless cars and companion robots? At the same time, intelligent trial and error is not only applicable to risky technologies but to large sociotechnical undertakings more generally. How have builders of communitarian technologies used intelligent trial-and-error strategies to more reliably deliver on their promises? I consider a recently developed neighborhood in Freiburg that has achieved high rates of walkability through the involvement of citizen-led building collectives in a broader process of “learning while planning.” The success of this German neighborhood provides a lesson in how to improve the application of communitarian urban design ideas, including new urbanism, elsewhere. A comparison of the fortunes of two very different New York food cooperatives further illustrates how effective trial-and-error learning can influence the success of communitarian endeavors. At the same time, the barriers to intelligently steering technological development loom large. I explore what could be done to lessen those barriers.
Technically Together offers a very different perspective on networked individualism than is typically presented. I do not simply emphasize the dimensions of community life poorly supported via networks but go on to describe the thinning out of sociality as highly contingent, not preordained. Everyday life is the product of numerous and vast sociotechnical systems: people, institutions, artifacts, built environments, infrastructures, and beliefs.34 The thinning out of togetherness has happened through the gradual replacement of sociotechnical components that had previously supported thick community with more individuating versions of them. The substitution of vibrant urban areas with suburbia is one example, a process accelerated by the amenability of other sociotechnical systems to suburbanization—including financing, transit networks, planning policy, and cultural ideas about the good life.
Readers, however, should not expect me to offer a silver bullet solution for the problem of community decline, for there is no single technology or policy that would bring about revolutionary changes in how societies provide communal belonging. Large-scale sociotechnical changes, despite occasional revolutionary rhetoric, happen ploddingly over the course of years, decades, and generations. Reconstructing societies to be more thickly communitarian would require the incremental and piecemeal replacement of much of the scaffolding of everyday life, as was the case for the networked individualization of social connection. Not only do material components, including neighborhoods and transportation systems, need to be altered but so do less tangible elements, such as zoning codes, systems of governance, practices of child rearing, and cultural beliefs.
Neither do I nostalgically pine for romantic idealizations of community. References to the “good old days” do not appear in the following pages. Even though everyday life has been more communitarian at other times and places, those eras and locales had other problems. As Putnam noted, the “golden age” of civic activity in the United States coincided with high levels of structural racism and sexism.35 At the same time, thick community life should not be relegated to the dustbin of history simply because some previous societies could have practiced it better. To think otherwise ignores the existing and potential diversity of the phenomenon. Citizens banding together to fight racism in their cities and to encourage their neighbors to be more tolerant are as much manifestations of community as the more undesirable instances that come to mind. In any case, it is better to focus on the future. How could future technological societies be more communitarian and socially just?
Furthermore, I do not claim that communities could or should be radically thickened overnight. As with any other complex sociotechnical endeavor, efforts to thicken social life should proceed intelligently, which often means incrementally. Realizing the best features of thick community while avoiding potentially undesirable side effects will take some combination of thoughtful and democratic deliberation, gradual learning from experience, and other elements of intelligent trial-and-error learning. Even though I dedicate considerable attention to the barriers to realizing more thickly communitarian societies, I do not provide a foolproof or exhaustively detailed roadmap. The best strategies for overcoming the relevant barriers will be borne out of experimentation by activists and others. I only aim to help readers begin to think more deeply about how the sociotechnical world presently limits opportunities to realize thick community and to consider what might begin to be done about it.
Finally, although I have made efforts to draw on a diverse range of examples and data, the analysis is presented from a North American’s point of view. Its applicability to other nations depends on the extent to which they have moved toward American-style networked individualism. In any case, I hope my depiction of the social consequences of North American technological changes can serve as a warning to people living in other nations. Such readers should pay particular attention to the various political, economic, and cultural factors that I depict as aiding the momentum of the technologies of networked individualism, if they wish to protect themselves against similar changes to social belonging in their own countries.
I contend that people should neither pine for a mythic past nor fatalistically accept the status quo but should pursue collective action to realize more desirable futures. Technological societies that better support more multi-faceted communities for a broader range of their members would be possible if citizens quit sleepwalking through the process of technological change and demanded more from their technologies. By the end of this book, I will have sketched out the beginnings of how such societies could be realized.