Techniques and gadgets are no less important than urban form, infrastructures, and organizations for developing thick community. Overemphasizing the latter technologies can give the impression that community is something that begins only when people walk out their front doors. Community, however, is not simply a public matter supported by large-scale technologies but is scaffolded on the sum total of everyday practice and private experience. Hence, I extend my analysis to the tools and techniques that help shape both public and domestic life. Gadgets, household appliances as well as approaches to child rearing, through their enablements and constraints, either stymie or spur along the development of communitarian beings.
Citizens cannot be expected to act in communal ways without experiences that teach them how to be communitarian. As historian Arthur Schlesinger observed, a central value of voluntary associations has been their role in apprenticing people in the practices of democratic political community:
Rubbing minds as well as elbows, [association members] have been trained from youth to take common counsel, choose leaders, harmonize differences, and obey the expressed will of the majority. In mastering the associative way they have mastered the democratic way.1
How are the dispositions, beliefs, proclivities, and skills that enable citizens to act as thick communitarians rather than networked individualists influenced by the techniques and artifacts they use and have used on them? Techniques and artifacts, of course, cannot function without larger sociotechnical systems. A television is not worth much without communication networks to feed it with content. Nevertheless, the focus of this chapter is the question, How do small-scale technologies mediate citizens’ psychosocial development? Do they encourage a retreat from thick community or stymie the development of thick social ties? Even though the use of techniques and things might seem insignificant at the level of individuals, I argue that their aggregate effect on the preconditions for thick community life can be substantial.
I begin with an example that will likely seem irrelevant at first: home heating. Philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann rooted his analysis of the character of contemporary technological life on the distinction between a central heating system and the traditional wood-fired hearth, referring to the former as a technological device and the latter as a focal thing.2 Both technologies, according to Borgmann, have a discernible patterning effect on the shape of everyday life. A central heating system is a device because it provides heat as a commodity to be called up on demand by setting a thermostat. The systems and mechanisms by which it produces heat are invisible to the user and, usually, wholly irrelevant to daily life. The hearth or wood stove is a focal thing because it demands that the user engage with its functioning. It cannot be stopped or started at will nor adjusted without some knowledge of building fires, ensuring proper airflow, and collecting and preparing wood. For Borgmann, the value of technologies like hearths lies in the meaningful focal practices that develop around them. The working and maintenance of a wood stove, much like craft work or motorcycle repair,3 engages users’ minds and bodies as it engages them with the material world. In contrast, central heating systems are simply turned off or on, and one places a call to an expert technician when they fail. Devices provide far fewer opportunities for focal practices.
The social dimension of this distinction is often overshadowed by Borgmann’s analysis of the personal and experiential value of focal practices. The hearth, in his philosophy, does not merely support focal practices but serves as a center or focus for domestic activity as well. Keeping it running and collecting wood is often a cooperative activity among household members, and its warmth draws them together in social communion on cold days. One study elicited the recollection that “everybody sat in the living room because it was cold. And all sat around the fire, so we were more social.”4 Moreover, social psychological experiments have demonstrated that perceptions of physical and social warmth are tightly intertwined. Feelings of warmth, whether produced by holding a warm drink or being in a warm room, lead to more favorable evaluations of others, increased generosity, and more frequent use of relationally focused language.5 The hearth is not merely a focus for domestic activities but converts the provision of physical warmth into a mechanism for social bonding. Many readers may have already noticed how social intimacy seems relatively easy around a bonfire or fireplace.
Central heating systems, on the other hand, promote the diffusion of activity throughout households. Indeed, they are probably more accurately termed distributed heating systems. The central unit is hidden in a basement, closet, or attic, and heat is distributed through a mostly invisible system of vents aimed at providing heating uniformly throughout a building. Not only are there few, if any, accompanying practices that support interaction, but central heating systems do little to physically incentivize social congregation. In fact, the implementation of distributed heating systems in public housing in England led to household members spending less time together.6 Central heating, of course, does not prohibit household gatherings, but by rendering domestic community more voluntary, heating technologies can be seductions against it. The ostensible comforts of privatism often already appear as an alluring escape from the likely conflicts of collective living. Technologies like central heating act like a thumb on the scale, strengthening the appeal of physical separation.
The differences between distributed and nondistributed heating systems for community reflect and reinforce moral ideas about social reality. The Japanese variant of the hearth is the kotatsu: a charcoal or electric heater placed underneath a table-mounted blanket. On cold days in Japan’s traditionally uninsulated homes, household members must gather around the kotatsu to be warm. This technology stems from and reinforces the Japanese cultural focus on relational collectivism. Indeed, as families in Fukuoka began “spending less time socializing and more time in individual activities” in the late twentieth century, was it merely a coincidence that they were heating more rooms within their houses?7 Thus, the design of home heating is no mere technical decision but a mechanism for strengthening certain social values and practices at the expense of others.
Distributed central heating also reflects and reproduces a networked individualistic moral order. One study framed the shift from central hearths to distributed heating as leading to an ostensibly beneficial reduction in intrafamilial conflict as children then spent more time in their own bedrooms.8 This framing reflects the liberal moral injunction of private suburban life: minimize conflict through the avoidance of others. To be fair, a wood or gas stove, kotatsu, or other focal heating unit does not force household members to resolve their conflicts productively—they may still choose to ignore them or act childishly. Because such systems physically incentivize copresence, however, they discourage isolation as a solution to conflict. In contrast, distributed central heating systems provide an ersatz version of domestic harmony, as does suburbia on a larger scale, by limiting the possibility of interpersonal conflict and thereby interfering with the development of the negotiation skills needed for political community.
Despite early hopes that televisions or family desktop computers could become “electronic hearths,” such technologies’ ability to center domestic life turns out to have been more mixed. Television viewing no doubt does not always mean glazed-eyed passivity, because two or more viewers can talk over and around their televisions. Potential interaction is limited, however, by the increasing prevalence of TVs in bedrooms: Children with their own set on average spend roughly 20 percent more of their time watching television alone.9 As is the case with distributed heating systems, bedroom TV sets allow family members to more easily sidestep conflicts and promote social diffusion. In fact, even Dr. Spock advocated them as a way of minimizing parent-child conflict over what to watch.10 The consequences of shifting from the family computer to laptops and tablets is probably much the same: social diffusion and the avoidance of conflict.
At the same time, would one really want to equate the social interactions happening around a kotatsu or wood stove with those between people watching the same television or computer? In the latter case, participants’ eyes are more often drawn to the screen rather than each other’s faces, and the conversation material is more frequently dominated by that night’s programming or the latest viral videos. Even though the continued presence of some form of talking makes overly dystopian portrayals of mass media devices as turning viewers into antisocial zombies seem hyperbolic, it is reasonable to worry about potential declines in the quality of conversation. Political scientist Janet Flammang points out that “conversation is an art best learned through an apprenticeship with skilled conversationalists.”11 Good conversation requires the ability to introduce and talk about controversial topics without being alienating, to pay attention to the needs and interests of others, and to artfully tell stories. Good conversationalists are capable of reading the emotional states of their interlocutors by observing body language and facial expressions.12 Even though people can bond over watching Breaking Bad or cat videos on YouTube, rarely is such bonding either a product of good conversation or an apprenticeship in talking.
Learning the skills of civil conversation and bonding forms of talk requires appropriate technological arrangements. Are digital devices up to the task? As one teenage boy who primarily communicated with his friends via texting told Internet scholar Sherry Turkle, “someday, someday … I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”13 This state of affairs among youth in technological societies contrasts sharply with the social precociousness of children in communities that lack televisions and other media devices, such as those in traditional New Guinean villages.14
In addition to limiting screen time, strengthening conversational skills can come from increasing opportunities for talk. Flammang describes the communal and family dinner table as a technology around which the practices and skills of thoughtful, civil conversation can be cultivated.15 Partly for this reason, the Slow Food movement opposes the stop-and-refuel eating practices typically associated with fast food and microwave dinners, hoping to maintain the traditional European practice of long mealtimes. For households facing a time crunch from their harried lifestyles or allured by the conveniences of individual microwaveable dinners, however, communal dining can feel more like a chore than a pleasure. Deficits in the requisite time, money, and expertise may make it more difficult to pursue a slower, talk-based approach to mealtimes.
Given the influence of the above domestic technologies, the growing proclivity against living with others or making relational commitments, found by sociologists such as Eric Klinenberg,16 seems understandable. People who grow up in environments that enable and encourage social diffusion and solitary leisure through personal technologies are less prepared to productively work through domestic conflicts with roommates or romantic partners. My point here is not that previous generations did not face their own barriers to constructive conflict resolution. Rather, I mean to suggest only that such technologically shaped experiences work against all the prosocial instruction contemporary citizens might receive elsewhere, including in therapy sessions or through the workplace. At any rate, inexperience with conflict negotiation and emotionally attentive face-to-face talking has ramifying consequences for community. Indeed, social movements guided by a “personalistic” ethos—where members’ participated primarily for the gains to a sense of individual self-actualization—struggled to act as a collective and tended to disintegrate when faced with conflict.17 Recall the similar tendency, among suburban gated community and high-rise-housing cooperative residents to move rather than directly confront contention. This behavior only seems normal when it mirrors peoples’ early formative experiences with conflict: avoidance. Would such a moral order be likely to change without parallel shifts in domestic technology?
Domestic environments help cultivate a strong, arguably overdeveloped, sense of individuality. The heating and personal technologies that promote domestic social diffusion work similarly to the networks and organizations discussed in chapter 5. The fact that they make their goods immediately available for the individual user and with little engagement from other household members helps to frame households not as small-scale communities but as systems of nodes for the flows and movements of networked individuals, with parents sometimes ending up feeling like taxi services for their children, or family members having to e-mail each other to coordinate their schedules.18 Much of citizens’ preparation to become operators of social networks rather than thick communitarians begins in the home.
Domestic technologies do not give birth to networked individualism by themselves but parallel and strengthen understandings of social reality imparted during childhood and adolescence. The predominant approach to establishing infants’ sleep patterns in North America and Europe remains the cry-it-out method, wherein infants are placed in their cribs, often in separate rooms, and parents refrain from coming to comfort their child for varying lengths of time. Some even advocate “going cold turkey.” The process is meant to help infants learn to “self-soothe.” Although this practice might seem perfectly natural to many Americans, it is a cultural peculiarity. Both prior to the twentieth century and around the world the standard practice has been the immediate soothing of infants by caretakers as well as bed sharing.19
The emergence of solitary infant sleeping and “crying it out” as the prevailing wisdom came with justifications that it better instilled self-reliance and independence. Needing physical contact with another human being in order to sleep was, in turn, framed as an unhealthy form of dependence, somehow different from the myriad other ways young children are utterly reliant on others. Cultivating this kind of “self-reliance” has become valuable, as anthropologist Eyal Ben-Ari has noted, because it speeds the integration of children into the work schedules of parents in industrialized nations.20 Cosleeping or frequently waking to tend to a fussy child is rarely compatible with an inflexible nine-to-five workday or the requirement that people work forty hours or more per week. Independently sleeping infants are valuable because most parents have little autonomy regarding their own sleep patterns. At the same time, one should not discount the benefits to parents from the hour or so of “child-free” time that such practices can ensure, especially given how many technological societies render stay-at-home parenting a full-time and largely solitary endeavor. Regardless, crying it out helps naturalize the moral imaginary of the unencumbered self. It is a psychocultural technology that lays the groundwork for the “therapeutic individualism” described by Bellah and his coauthors.21 It trains children to think of themselves as mainly responsible for their own sleep; too much dependence on parents is framed as potentially pathological.
Similar moral ideas undergirded the twentieth-century shift toward most children having their own separate bedrooms. Early psychologists advocated for private bedrooms not only as a means to cultivate “self-reliance” but also because of Freudian-inspired fears of “momism,” the pathological dependence on one’s mother, and worries that room or bed sharing encouraged incest and threatened children’s “sexual hygiene.” Such arguments gradually gave way to the belief that private space is a stepping stone to adulthood and a necessary part of an individual’s expressive development. The percentage of teens with their own room in the United States increased from some 30 percent to more than 80, probably playing some role in the near tripling of the average home size over the twentieth century.22 However desirable or pleasant one’s own space might be, providing teenagers with a surfeit of solitary space is likely to produce adults that expect a level of privacy only found in suburbia or solo dwelling. Would it be reasonable to expect youth to grow up to be capable communitarians when the increasingly prevalent adolescent rite of passage is the provision of domestic isolation?
The private bedroom, moreover, plays a significant role in enculturating youth to be consumers. A private bedroom becomes a space to be filled with things reflecting one’s individualized identity as a budding consumer-adult. Photographer James Mollison’s collection of photographs of “Where Children Sleep” from across the world illustrates the considerable effort and expense to which affluent Western children go to materialize their identities.23 An eleven-year old American hunting enthusiast has a bedroom festooned in “camo” patterns and weapons, and a fourteen-year old Scottish girl drapes her room in photos of rock stars, police caution tape, and skull-and-crossbones flags.
French social theorist Jean Baudrillard described this practice as the curating of the self through collections of objects, substituting conflictual human relationships with a feeling of consumer freedom and purchased uniqueness via a personalized relationship with things.24 Teenagers in consumer-oriented technological societies learn to retreat from domestic relational conflict to the comfort of systems of consumer goods that reflect and reinforce the unique personal identities they have sought to buy for themselves. No doubt bedrooms can just as easily be filled with gifts from others that reference and support relationships,25 but such objects must compete with alluring consumer products. As consumer culture infiltrates the lives of youth, buying and having is put into conflict with the practices of being and relating—which, in turn, upsets parent-child interactions and negatively affects children’s well-being.26 The continued effect of consumerism into adulthood has been depicted in the movie Fight Club, as the protagonist flips through an IKEA catalog on his toilet while describing how his carefully designed apartment reflects who he is or, more likely, who he wishes to be.27
Regardless, the belief that separate sleeping arrangements and crying it out produces more self-reliant, confident adults has never been borne out in observation. In fact, geographer Jared Diamond described the cosleeping youth of Papua New Guinea as reliably developing into capable adults without any signs of pathological forms of reliance.28 Some developmental studies have found that cosleeping children tend to be emotionally healthier and even show certain forms of autonomy earlier than solitary sleepers, in particular dressing themselves and making friends independently.29 Other studies, however, have found no significant relationship between sleeping patterns and pathological behavior.30 Given the lack of firm data that crying it out and separate bedrooms actually produce better functioning people, might it be that their function is to adapt infants to “modern” schedules and provide parents a much needed respite from the stresses of childcare, among other practical concerns?
Solitary sleeping and crying it out, in any case, set the stage for naturalizing individualistic understandings of independence later in life. It frames autonomy as achieved through the ability to disconnect rather than integrate. Consider how, especially in North America, England, and Australia, young children have become increasingly sheltered within the home or under the close eye of parents. Their mobility within their towns and neighborhoods has shrunk over the course of a couple of generations from several miles to as little as no further than the house next door. A case in point is how the percentage of British seven- and eight-year-olds allowed to walk to school unsupervised fell from 80 percent to less than 10 percent between 1970 and 1990, with similar trends existing in countries like Australia and the United States.31 More and more children, therefore, experience autonomy as a freedom achievable only by disconnecting from their parents by surfing online spaces or driving a car. Outside these spaces, autonomy for Western youth is exercised mainly in the cultivation of an individual expressive identity, which often amounts to purchasing certain kinds of music, clothing, room decor, and other paraphernalia. Freedom under such terms equals the individual operation of communication, retail, or transportation networks.
Youth in North America and Europe as well as in most other parts of the world have traditionally enjoyed a great deal of geographic mobility. Jared Diamond, for instance, recalled how a ten-year-old New Guinean boy was allowed to leave his home for over a month to help move equipment from one village to another.32 The kinds of autonomy provided by an automobile or an Internet connection and that experienced by Diamond’s young assistant are quite different. In the latter case, geographic mobility was allowed because of the careful eye of neighboring villagers. In much the same way, family friends, neighbors, and acquaintances would watch out for children walking to school in the early to mid-twentieth century United States.
Child-rearing approaches thus differ with respect to how they frame independence: Is it a product of individual atomism or community embeddedness? The feasibility of any given approach is no doubt a collective issue. It would be unreasonable to ask parents to give their children a long leash in an acommunal neighborhood. That would leave them vulnerable. On the other hand, intensive parental supervision and low levels of community engagement form a vicious cycle: sequestered children cannot cultivate friendships that draw neighboring parents together or build social trust. In turn, a lack of trust motivates parents to keep a short leash on their children. The retreat of childhood into the home, or to highly structured, adult-supervised hobbies, reflects and reinforces a dearth of local social connection. Indeed, as several recent cases well demonstrate, it seems as if many people are willing to do no more to help coparent local children than call the police and have parents arrested when their kids are found playing without supervision in a public park, left in a car for five minutes during an errand, or discovered “playing hooky” from church.33 The culture of avoidance and lack of care increasingly characteristic of contemporary neighborhoods leads to the state taking over functions previously accomplished by community. Anonymous calls to policing institutions come to replace the soft surveillance, nosiness, and care enacted by neighbors in ensuring the collective safety of children.
The parenting practices that have created what Karen Malone has termed the “bubble-wrap generation” have still more consequences for community.34 The replacement of unstructured play with formalized sports and classes means that parents spend more time shuttling children around and inevitably less time maintaining their other social ties. Parenting can quickly become more of a retreat from community than a further embedding into it. Moreover, as I noted earlier, overly structured environments decrease the number of opportunities for youth to learn to cultivate and organize their own communities.
Acommunal living areas are unlikely to develop flourishing social networks overnight, and perhaps conditions are wrong for already-built suburbs to turn into seven-dimensional communities. Nevertheless, more communitarian forms of youth autonomy could be established by setting aside more spaces for unstructured play. Consider the Land, an “adventure playground” in Wales that provides children with access to all sorts of building materials, hand tools, barrels to start fires in, and a creek. Although they are supervised by playworkers, the latter only intervene when an accident looks to be imminent.35 Such playgrounds provide the support, and a minimal level of safety, for children to play more collaboratively, test their own limits with regard to safety, and teach their younger brethren how to start fires and build forts. Although some degree of self-organization can occur in traditional playgrounds, the way that children can collaboratively build and unbuild their play environment in spaces like the Land provides greater potential for the development of political community and a psychological sense of place. Adventure playgrounds offer children the ability to enact their own versions of the communal barn raising. The involvement of local residents in the provision of tools and building materials at the Land, moreover, suggests that adventure playgrounds have spill-over benefits for intergenerational communality. Regardless, such semisupervised spaces help open the door for children to more often realize autonomy via community integration rather than networked disconnection.
Gadgets, tools, and devices may also limit the potential for thick community by discouraging public involvement and sociability. Information and communications technologies (ICTs) can displace other forms of interaction in everyday life. For example, “More television watching means less of virtually every form of civic participation and social involvement.”36 TV watching partly displaces thick communality with weak symbolic communities knitted together by shared viewing. Part of the displacement effect is rooted in the development of parasocial relationships with television characters. Viewers have been found to experience a sense of belonging when watching favored TV shows, despite the lack of actual reciprocated interaction.37 Insofar as this sense of community partly satiates the felt loneliness of viewers, especially for stay-at-home parents or the unemployed, it disincentivizes broader community involvement. It would be unfair to solely blame television for this outcome, however; the relative dearth of vibrant public spaces, at least in areas like North America, leaves citizens with little alternative.
Media-driven domestic cocooning is exacerbated by the degree to which citizens can afford and pursue increasingly sophisticated home theater systems as well as streaming services offering movies and television shows on demand. To be fair, there remains little communality around most cinemas left to displace, given their movement out of neighborhoods and into regional mall multiplexes surrounded by a quarter mile of parking lot in every direction. Nevertheless, the multiplying conveniences and richness of these technologies persuade and seduce users toward making the home more and more the site of their leisure time. Further driving this shift are increased anxieties about public danger. Media scholar Barbara Klinger has described how home theater systems are marketed as “providing self-sufficiency and refuge from the hazards of the public sphere.”38 Although Klinger was mainly discussing the perceived hazards presented by terrorism in a post-9/11 world, it would be surprising if contemporary anxieties over mass shootings and other crimes did not motivate similar purchases. Indeed, some observers have associated the sizable uptick in purchases of high-resolution televisions and high-end cable subscriptions to the growing perception of public sporting events as ever more dangerous—a likely contributor to recent declines in professional sports attendance.39
It is unlikely that television, especially home theaters, could support thick community. Research into making television more “social” tends to focus on seamlessly integrating texting and social media into the viewing process rather than building local solidarities.40 Though perhaps helpful for networked individualists wanting to simulate the collective watching experience without the obligations that come with playing host to other human bodies, such technological developments would do little to get people to leave their dens. In any case, one of the few areas where something like communal TV watching could be realized is televised sports. Even the smallest European towns will host public viewings of popular soccer matches on large outdoor screens. Although such practices directly support relatively thin forms of symbolic community via collective spectacle, the potential for talk and establishing local social bonds means they are still an incremental improvement over solitary viewing. In any case, it may take fairly drastic measures to end television viewing’s dominance of citizens’ leisure time in industrialized nations, ranging from around a quarter of people’s free time in Germany to over half in the United States.41
Technologies like air conditioning are little different than television in their communal effects. In contrast, front porches, plazas, and public water fountains are all urban design features that help provide a respite from the summer heat in ways that draw residents out into public or, at least, semipublic spaces. Air conditioning, though admittedly pleasant and convenient, is a material incentive to stay indoors. Indeed, the presence of A/C discourages residents from occupying their front porches and, hence, they are more seldom used for neighboring.42 Front porches, moreover, have been decreasing in size under the pressure of expanding garages and driveways to an extent that they have become more symbolic than functional. Their usage is further discouraged by relatively empty suburban sidewalks and the draw of backyard pools and decks made alluring by increased cultural expectations for privacy. Such changes exert a negative force on public communality. Political scientist Eric J. Oliver explained part of the relative dearth of civic engagement in newer Sun Belt cities, such as Phoenix, with their greater reliance on air conditioning and lack of large porches and shaded sidewalks. Privatized cooling technologies encourage more privatized forms of sociability.43
The relationship of digital ICTs with thick community is more complex: they give as well as take away. E-mail, social media, and cell phones are all social technologies in a way that television is not. Still, they enable the supplanting of local, thick community with networked individualism. Similar to how TV offers surrogate parasocial relationships, the extent to which e-mail and online social networking make remaining homebound less lonesome persuades people away from public communality. ICTs are admittedly little different from the telephone in that regard, and this, of course, can only be true for those who are not cyberasocials. Regardless, any improvement in people’s ability to maintain distant connections inevitably means some displacement of more proximate forms of socializing. People have only so much free time, so much need for social intimacy, and can maintain only so many social connections. Calling distant contacts or texting a friend across town are alluring options when faced with the uncertainties inherent in establishing deeper relationships with nearby coworkers or popping in next door. Long-distance communication devices enable users to rely on already established and less proximate bonds and avoid the risks and effort involved in getting to know neighbors and strangers. It is therefore hardly surprising that sociological studies of one Toronto neighborhood found that the frequency of face-to-face interactions between close neighbors had decreased to one half their 1978 levels by 2005.44 ICTs help drive networked individualism.
The degree to which Internet access writ large displaces rather than facilitates local community engagement partly depends on how it is used and by whom. Social butterflies are typically as active online as off. Those who are satisfied with and participate in their geographic communities pursue more community-oriented uses of ICTs. Furthermore, given ICTs’ logistical advantages over the telephone and letter writing, it is not at all surprising that the most civically engaged of citizens usually happen to be avid e-mail writers and online social networkers.45 Yet, ICT use just as often comes at the cost of communal activity. Some studies have associated an increased use of ICTs with increased time spent at home, greater feelings of loneliness, and less time talking face to face with friends and family.46 Others show that, although social ICT use can engender feelings of connection, a sense of isolation often remains. Users who utilize ICTs as a means for coping with loneliness and poor social skills are liable to get stuck in a vicious cycle: compulsive Internet use leads to negative life outcomes like missing work or social engagements and, hence, greater feelings of loneliness.47 It appears that some people’s pursuit of Internet-enabled connectedness provides weak or negative social returns. So contemporary ICTs are communally ambiguous at best: motivated communitarians and those complementing already extensive offline social networks probably benefit from them, but the chronically lonely, the socially unskilled, cyberasocials, and those discontented by deficits of face-to-face talking often do not.
I do not mean, however, to downplay the importance of online spaces as refuges for those excluded from their local community because of disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg, for instance, argued that the existence of online forums for those left relatively homebound by Lou Gehrig’s disease, to take one example, illustrates the communal potential of online spaces, namely offering disadvantaged populations the chance to discuss their worries and tribulations with people like them.48 Similar references to gay or transgender teens living in intolerant areas are practically cliché in discussions of the Internet and community, though not without good reason. Virtual gathering spaces for those marginalized within their local environs no doubt provide them with a much needed sense of belonging and relative safety.
On the other hand, such spaces seem less liberatory once one recognizes their similarities to the urban ghettos that have housed and provided rich community life to religious and racial minorities throughout the centuries.49 Few would extol the liberating potential of ethnic ghettos. I see little reason to get too excited over virtual ghettos being made available to people otherwise excluded by contemporary technological societies. Would it not be more just for all citizens, including the aged, disabled, and sexual/racial minorities, to be able to realize multifaceted forms of communal belonging rather than be sequestered to virtual social networks? The provision of quasi-ghettoized online communities for the oppressed and collectively forgotten but thicker forms of community for everyone else would hardly be a desirable outcome with respect to principles of social justice or communitarianism.
At the same time, the example of marginalized and oppressed groups finding some sense of communal solidarity online is often used to imply that worries about digital devices and isolation are overwrought or a concern of the “privileged” (and hence are ostensibly unimportant). Such arguments, however, fail to give compassionate recognition to people’s diverse subjective experiences. For those who find digitally mediated social interactions less fulfilling, a society increasingly predicated on them can feel alienating, if not oppressive. In the same way that a socially just American society would recognize that African Americans and other minorities do not experience the criminal justice system or the labor market in the same way as whites and attempt to rectify the resulting inequities, a technologically just society would admit that people experience sociotechnical arrangements differently and seek to limit the extent to which harm is disproportionately shouldered by certain populations.
Although I have been mostly discussing Internet use through a homebound computer, the same conclusions apply to portable digital devices. Cell phones allow users to constantly remain in contact with their already established strong ties. They enable tele-cocooning or social privatism. Much like the personal automobile, portable ICTs allow their users to bring a modicum of private space with them wherever they go. Indeed, mobile phone users, and to a slightly lesser extent those on laptops and tablets, are notably inattentive to their surroundings in public and semipublic spaces—much more so than book readers. ICT users often adopt a physical stance that closes off interaction, avoids the gaze of others, and disrupts copresent conversation.50
The extent to which users are hunkered down with their devices of course depends partly on their intentions. For those explicitly seeking public communality, their device is often merely an excuse to be out at a Wi-Fi hotspot rather than a shield used to block contact with other people.51 However, the choice between public communality and tele-cocooning is hardly an unbiased one. Mobile devices frequently seduce users into privatism because they offer an alluring escape from the risks inherent in interacting with strangers or mere acquaintances. A text to one’s spouse or partner is a much less anxiety-provoking way to pass five minutes waiting for the bus than talking to a nearby person. San Francisco secondary students assigned to go through a three-day digital detox, for example, learned that, without their devices, they more often conversed with family members and interacted with people they usually did not.52 Professional sport coaches, moreover, have complained about declines in team bonding as players increasingly cocoon with their smartphone or mp3 player when in dressing rooms or on the team bus.53 Again, the satiation of the need for belonging via distant ties often comes at the expense of more proximate interactions.
Several recently developed technologies go much further in depressing talk and public sociability. Smartphone apps, like Cloak and Split, enable users to track their contacts in order to avoid running into them in public. Restaurants like Panera Bread and Chili’s are replacing their waitstaff with touchscreen ordering kiosks.54 These are more explicitly antisocial technologies. The former enhance social privatism and enable users to shun potentially conflictual or boring interactions with ex-partners or acquaintances. The latter, though replacing an interaction that is already to some degree socially automated, nevertheless results in a further decrease in opportunities to engage in embodied face-to-face conversation with another human being. Self-ordering kiosks are unlikely to have a button labeled “small talk.” While those with already vibrant social networks might look favorably on the ostensible increases in “efficiency,” for others, the loss of such routine encounters may eliminate a sizable chunk of their everyday embodied social contact.
Although some network sociologists depict many of the technologically enabled capacities discussed above as simply a desirable expansion of choice regarding social interaction,55 such a view relies on the presumption that people are choosing—or even can choose—their social contact rationally, in line with their own reflective preferences. It assumes that people are actually content with their “choices” to “check out” of public sociability. The reason that television and other media devices evoke such ire is that many users recognize that the emotional and psychological pull of those devices leads them to develop habits that they do not find desirable or healthy, upon reflection. Indeed, psychological studies suggest that many people actually do not prefer digitally mediated activities but choose them in part because of the lower amounts of risk and effort they demand.56
As Sherry Turkle has argued, “Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities.”57 I suspect that most readers have regretted letting a marathon of Netflix viewing eclipse a night out, or pretending to read text messages when alone in public rather than striking up a conversation. Although ICTs and other media are certainly used by some to pursue greater community, much of that potential is left to users’ individual cognitive resolve as well as their underlying social aptitude and disposition. Social belonging becomes more a personal responsibility than a public good. Thus the communitarian compatibility of current ICTs seems inevitably limited. Although they enable social connection through networked individualism, those who prefer the kind of face-to-face talking and public sociability characteristic of thick community have good reason to desire very different ICTs or restrictions on their use.
Other technologies are much less ambiguous in their communitarian consequences. Consider concealed-carry handgun licenses (CHLs). Though firearms no doubt can support forms of thick community, namely within the shooting and hunting clubs that serve as third places and center local social bonding, concealed-carry handguns signify and reinforce a symbolic, moral, and practical escape from local thick community. Sociologist Angela Stroud found that many Texan CHL holders ascribed to hyperindividualistic and antisocial moral imaginaries.58 Citing potential victimization as a reason for obtaining a CHL, her interviewees acted in ways that reflected an intense fear of the world outside their door. They tried to avoid any public contact with strangers, some even bringing a loaded gun when answering the front door. The technology of the concealed/self-defense handgun appears to enable and reinforce a more tense, fearful, and antisocial approach to public interactions, at least in some populations. Indeed, armed motorists are more likely to engage in hostile “road rage” behavior, and others have well described the increased recklessness that can come with owning a handgun.59
One illustrative example occurred when a Kalamazoo, Michigan, CHL holder, Walt Wawra, visited Calgary, Canada, albeit without his concealed firearm.60 Ostensibly feeling accosted by two Canadian men in Nose Hill Park asking him if he had been to the city’s annual rodeo event yet, he placed himself between them and his wife and abruptly ended the interaction. Wawra’s ensuing letter to the Calgary Herald, complaining about Canada’s stringent handgun laws and his gratitude that these two strangers had not pulled a weapon on him, amused Canadian readers. To them, Wawra appeared to suffer from a pathological form of paranoia: Nose Hill Park is not particularly dangerous, nor are public conversations, at least in Calgary, something to be frightened of. In light of Stroud’s research, Wawra’s exaggerated fearfulness to seemingly mundane and innocuous public interactions appears to be common among many CHL holders. The technology, of course, does not do this by itself. An overdeveloped sense of “stranger danger” is amplified by CHL training, which depicts public spaces and interactions as inherently threatening.
Many of Stroud’s interviewees, moreover, associated having a CHL with “self-reliance” and not having to “depend on society,” which should be a familiar acommunal refrain to readers by now.61 Deriding the moral resolve of people who rely on police for protection, Stroud’s interviewees championed a personal responsibility model of security, seeing themselves as more exemplary citizens and ideally unfettered individuals. This extreme individualism was also apparent in their attraction to “survival prepping.” Many of the CHL holders interviewed by Stroud regularly stored caches of food, water, and ammunition, even going so far as to purchase rural land to prepare for the possibility of societal collapse. The Hobbesian and Social Darwinian subtext is clear: Stroud’s interlocutors perceived American society to be at the precipice of a war of all against all, within which only the most self-reliant, well-armed, and prepared—the fittest—would persevere. In fact, one person even described such a scenario as “God’s way of thinning the herd.”62
Regardless, turning to CHLs out of the fear of victimization, ironically during a period of historically low crime rates, undermines the potential for thick community. It signals that citizens have given up on collectively achieving security, preferring a private technological fix. To be fair, there is a kernel of reasonableness to citizens’ desires for CHLs when it is a response to perceptions of police inefficacy. Police do not typically arrive on the scene while the crime is still in progress, and for some populations, officers are as often victimizers as public servants.63 Concealed carry might feel like the only reasonable option when police departments are increasingly distant, centralized, and bureaucratic and when informal community-level mechanisms for ensuring safety have eroded. Policing is rarely subjected to local public oversight, and officers are too frequently cocooned within their patrol cars. Some community policing advocates promote the use of local oversight boards and the placing of officers in everyday interaction with residents. The hope with such arrangements is not just to allow residents to coproduce their own security and make officers more accountable but to establish more civil social bonds between police and locals as well. Community policing models, moreover, replace the traditional focus on arrest statistics with that of addressing community problems.64 Communitarian police departments are to be not autonomous and insulated but integrated with a range of institutions directed toward improving local quality of life.
Community policing methods strongly characterized the police force tasked with providing security to New York City’s public housing projects from the 1950s until the 1970s. As historian Fritz Umbach has outlined, the fairly successful implementation of community policing permitted the city’s projects to avoid suffering the same blight and decline of communality that characterized project housing in Chicago and St. Louis. Indeed, Umbach depicted housing authority policing as helping residents of New York City projects sustain community life, despite the drab impersonality of their modernist high-rise urban environment. The housing authority’s police department was highly decentralized: Officers were housed in on-site “record rooms”—typically commandeered apartments. Officers were, at the same time, accountable to civilian project managers and, hence, to residents. Most importantly, they walked the beat through the residential spaces of the projects, where they would chat with residents, reprimand misbehaving children (or report them to their parents), and enforce housing authority rules; they did not simply make arrests. Finally, the police force was partly staffed by residents and reflected their demographics. Indeed, the force was 60 percent black and Latino in 1975. The success of the housing authority’s community-oriented approach to policing is clear not only from below-average crime and victimhood rates, when compared with New York City as a whole, but also from the fact that local antipathy toward the NYPD did not extend to housing authority officers. In fact, incidents of brutality perpetrated by housing police were relatively rare, and residents held rent strikes to agitate for greater police presence, not less. 65
Like many other potentially more communitarian alternatives discussed so far, implementing effective and just community policing systems face significant barriers. They are likely to fail if not part of a multipronged strategy simultaneously focused on encouraging social ties as well as greater economic and political community. At the same time, public safety could more often be enacted outside official policing activities. Jane Jacobs, for instance, described residents of her Greenwich Village neighborhood intervening when it appeared that a man was attempting to abduct a young girl. Producing and reconstructing neighborhoods that better encourage street life and public acquaintanceship enables residents to provide for their own collective safety without necessarily involving the criminal justice industry.66
Although the comparison may seem odd, CHLs as social technologies are similar to companion robots and “synthetic humans,” which run the gamut from robotic seals provided to nursing home residents to interactive sex robots and noninteractive Real Dolls. However reasonable or benevolent it might seem to provide lonely seniors with a sense of companionship through an artificial pet, or a virtual lover to those without a romantic partner, such technical fixes further entrench social belonging and connection as a personal responsibility achieved through individual consumer purchases. Nursing and senior home residents are typically lonely because of contemporary education and employment systems, which lead many adults to live far away from their parents and often leave them with little time to either care for or visit elderly relatives. Inflated cultural expectations for privacy and self-reliance as well as the wider erosion of conflict negotiation skills render some retirees hesitant to move in with their children. In cities with poor transit systems and a sprawling urban landscape, an inability to drive leaves the elderly increasingly unable to seek out public sociality. The chronically lonely may turn to robotic companions because they lack the interpersonal skills and mobilities to succeed in a networked individualist society.
Such devices, in any case, are unlikely to lay the groundwork or otherwise eventually lead users toward thick community. Consider “Davecat,” a man who maintains relationships with two Real Dolls for whom he has invented background stories and personalities.67 Even though Davecat insists that his relationships with his dolls are authentic, in the end they remain fictive solipsisms. He does not commune with his partners but consumes them like any other gadget or market good. He alone controls their subjectivity, which frees him from the need to contend with the difficulties of human relationships. Indeed, Davecat has justified his lifestyle with the observation that “a synthetic will never lie to you, cheat on you, criticize you, or be otherwise disagreeable.”68 However convenient this arrangement may be for Davecat, it signifies and reinforces his inability to realize relationships with nonsynthetic humans. Surrounding himself with riskless, wholly agreeable, and fully controllable relationship partners, his relational skills are liable to further atrophy, and human others are increasingly likely to be seen as failing to measure up to what his gadgets offer.
Although Davecat is a more extreme example, and social robots remain merely a possibility on an uncertain horizon, his experience is suggestive of what might come to pass if companion and sex robots become more common. Some observers already argue that romantic relationships with synthetic humans are inevitable.69 As anyone who recognizes that technological development is not autonomous will know, few things are actually inevitable. Companion robots and other “virtual other” technologies will only come to shape people’s relational capacities if citizens fail to demand adequate regulation.
Companion robots and handguns seem like extreme cases. What about consumer gadgets more generally? Digital devices, such as those produced by Apple, are frequently glued shut or closed with esoteric screws. Even when users can gain access to the internal components, their design may render them difficult to service. One example is how simply replacing a bad monitor connection on a MacBook Pro requires carefully heat softening the surrounding adhesive and using a suction cup to remove the glass screen, hopefully without breaking it in the process. Parts may be unavailable or so expensive as to discourage repair. The combination of such barriers leads most users to discard old and faulty electronics or have them shipped back to the manufacturer for fixing. This practice, in turn, discourages the existence of nearby repairpersons and their businesses, at least in more affluent nations, to the detriment of economic community and local social connections.
Working to oppose the social and environmental effects of planned obsolescence and wired-shut artifacts are those involved in the Fixer movement. Fixers meet throughout North America, Australia, and Europe at “repair cafes” staffed by volunteer specialists.70 Though doing little to repair the damage to economic community, they nonetheless seek to encourage social community through the sharing of expertise, tools, and volunteer labor.
Difficult-to-service technologies also affect the development of gearhead and do-it-yourself (DIY) clubs, institutions whose role in local community should not be overlooked. Indeed, part of the “soulcraft” that philosopher Matthew Crawford described as inherent in working on classic automobiles and motorcycles stems from the fact that such activities typically take place within communities of practice.71 Speed shops and similar locales can turn into third places, connecting adults and providing opportunities for youngsters to develop their interest in mechanical things. Devices that are needlessly complex, feebly constructed, or sealed shut with rivets and glue, however, ill afford tinkering by the average citizen, who in turn is unlikely to look for others to tinker alongside them. The need for expensive or needlessly esoteric tools puts repair and modification out of reach for ordinary people. Every artifact thrown away or shipped off to a distant repair center signals the loss of a potentially more communitarian social or economic relationship.
Similarly, in less affluent nations, the well-intentioned dispersal of cutting-edge technologies to urban slums and rural villages—like nanopore water filters or genetically-modified seed—can undermine community. Such technologies encourage dependence on large-scale distant networks of expertise and manufacture from which the surrounding community and its resources are excluded. In contrast, “appropriate” or “intermediate” technologies are designed to be maintainable by the communities in which they are located.72 Rather than enforce dependence on far away firms, technologies like hand-operated water well pumps are flexible to a wider range of local repair practices. When combined with hand-operated drilling rigs, their construction is itself an act of community. Moreover, such pumps typically function only to the extent that they exist within communities cohesive enough to organize their maintenance—that is, insofar as locals can ensure that bolts are tightened, levers fixed, concrete aprons cleaned, and that children do not jam them with rocks.73 Therefore, they are technologies that can serve as an impetus to greater community rather than increased dependence on distant networks.
A range of techniques and devices shape citizens’ prospects for realizing thicker communities. First, technologies affect people’s ability to develop the necessary skills for political community by either centralizing or diffusing social life. Personal technologies and distributed heating systems privatize the domestic commons, obviating the need to resolve interpersonal conflicts. Television and companion robots provide users parasocial forms of intimacy that demand little obligation, displacing time and energy for building local social networks. Second, technologies can contribute to citizens’ expectations for privacy, independence, and individuality. The crying-it-out method and the provision of solitary bedrooms each help reproduce cultural valuations of privacy and the appearance of self-reliance, elements of thin communitarian moral orders. The restriction of youth autonomy to certain retail, transportation, and communication systems enculturates the belief that freedom is achieved through individualizing and impersonal networks. Third, technologies like companion robots, concealed-carry handguns, A/C, and ICTs provide private retreats from more communitarian forms of sociability and safety, which entail practices of talk and political community, among others. Technological retreats frame goods like social support, safety, cooling, and interaction as personal responsibilities fulfilled by purchasing the right technology rather than as a public good. Insofar as these technologies promise an alluring individual escape from risk, effort, or dependence on others, they seduce users toward cocooning. Finally, technologies that are excessively complex or difficult to repair and modify limit the development of third places, local social connections, and economic community by decreasing the ability of ordinary citizens to develop and maintain gearhead or DIY groups.
Surrounded by domestic and personal technologies more compatible with cocooning than communing, many children’s lives are essentially apprenticeships in networked individualism. Even motivated communitarians are likely to struggle with the barriers posed by phones designed more for shoring up networks than developing local solidarities and the alluringly riskless substitutions for human connection offered by self-checkout kiosks and virtual companions. Most of all, the proliferation of ever more technological activities and digital distractions means that members of technological societies face an increasing range of opportunities, though mainly with respect to how to spend their leisure time. If research showing how an overabundance of choice leads to less thoughtful choosing and more decision regret is correct, not only are people pushed to divide their leisure time across an ever greater number of possible diversions, but they are less likely to choose the kinds of activities they might actually want.74 As a result, many citizens are either stretched too thin to squeeze community engagement into their schedules or have given the possibility little thought, being overwhelmed by the myriad ways in which they could spend their evenings and weekends.
At the same time, the technologies discussed above each present a kind of social dilemma regarding community. They undermine community as a publicly provided social good in the same way that jumping over a subway turnstile undermines public transportation. While choosing backyard porches, concealed-carry handguns, or the cry-it-out method over their more communitarian alternatives appears insignificant at the level of the individual, the aggregate effect is an overall thinning of community. It is unlikely that citizens employing these technologies have foreseen, intended, or perhaps even desired such a result; nevertheless, the combined effect of their technological practices is the undermining of the conditions of possibility for thick community. At the same time, it is hard to blame people for doing what is within their grasp, even if it contributes to advancing networked individualism, given the broader forces that make realizing thick community difficult.
In any case, technological society could better support the development of communitarian beings. Such societies would enable parents to be able to choose cosleeping arrangements more often, encourage more hearthlike heating and cooling devices, and discourage isolating patterns of leisure. Community policing could be pursued as an alternative to concealed-carry licensing. Neighborhoods could better support public safety and sociability by including public and semipublic places to cool off on hot days, namely front porches. Creating more opportunities for citizens to practice thick community would obviate at least some of the felt need to use ICTs; such neighborhoods would better satiate residents’ needs for social intimacy. Finally, alternative playgrounds similar to the Land could provide children with more outdoor play opportunities that are semisupervised but otherwise self-organized. Such spaces would meet parents halfway on their “stranger danger” fears and urge to bubble wrap their children. They would provide kids with more exciting forms of play as well as the chance to learn to negotiate conflicts and be “bigger brothers and sisters” to their younger companions. Such changes would put citizens into more frequent interaction, support bonding, encourage the development of the skills of political community and talking, help center local community life, and provide the basis for a more communitarian moral order.
Table 6.1 Interconnections between Artifacts and Techniques and Dimensions of Community
| Dimension of Community | Thin/Barriers | Thick/Enablers |
| Social ties | Telephone, ICTs, “distributed” heating systems, apps like Cloak and Split, A/C, and private pools | Woodstoves, kotatsus, and other centralized heating technologies; parenting by neighbors |
| Exchange/support | Concealed-carry firearms, companion robots | Self-organized play spaces |
| Talk | Mobile digital devices and other ICTs, self-service kiosks, conversations while watching TV or online video | Public cooling technologies like front porches, plazas, and fountains; communal and family dinner table |
| Symbolic/psychological | Television, concealed-carry firearms | Public cooling technologies; collective viewing of sports/film by friends and neighbors |
| Economic | Hard-to-repair or unrepairable artifacts given resources of community | Intermediate technology, serviceable technologies |
| Political | Personal electronics, “distributed” heating systems, large affordances for privacy | Centralized heating, self-organized play spaces, community policing |
| Moral | Concealed-carry firearms, companion robots, cry-it-out method, private bedrooms, and child mobility achieved via networks | Community policing, child mobility achieved through community embeddedness |
***
Philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann tells his ethics students that “the most important decision you can make as a young couple is whether you are going to get a television and, if you do, where you are going to put it.”75 Though this claim might be slightly hyperbolic, Borgmann’s point is to get students to think about how using certain technologies influences the character of their lives. Purchasing a television and placing it in the center of one’s den signals that the room is more a space for viewing than for conversation. A television in the bedroom can end up becoming a distracting barrier to arguably more desirable intimate activities. Ownership of a TV and its placement in the home is never neutral: it reflects particular ideas about the good life and reinforces certain patterns of daily living.
Through an analysis of the enablements and constraints posed by different techniques, artifacts, infrastructures, and organizations in relation to the different dimensions of communality, I have illustrated their nonneutrality with respect to the practice of thick community. Urban form, infrastructures, organizations, techniques, and gadgets do not simply provide users access to needed and desired goods and services but suggest and support only certain communal forms. Suburbia erects all sorts of physical barriers to talking and dense webs of social ties as well as effectively excises economic and political community out of neighborhoods and places it in distant shopping and municipal centers. Infrastructural and organizational technologies, whether an energy system or a recreation center, can frame users as either individual nodes on a network or embedded in a community. Too often they fail to coincide with the boundaries of geographic thick communities in scale, governance, and the provision of economic benefit. Gadgets and techniques can inculcate high expectations for privacy, personal convenience, and independence. A concealed-carry handgun helps users sustain the fantasy that they alone can ensure the safety of their families and facilitates a withdrawal from public, collective systems for dealing with crime. The cry-it-out method, contemporary schooling, and household spaces that support diffusion and isolation help produce adults increasingly steeped in myths of self-reliance and independence as well as decreasingly able to tolerate copresence and conflict. This, in turn, helps construct and support a moral foundation from which forms of private living, such as through suburban living or solo apartment dwelling, appear to be natural and eminently desirable.
Such technologies are not the sole contributors, of course, to the thinning of community in technological societies. Mass media advertising generally promotes a culture of buying and having over one premised on being and relating. Community becomes an afterthought when people are pushed to think of themselves as consumers first and foremost, or whenever the demands of consumer society make it difficult for citizens to carve out the necessary time in their schedules. The fact that many people can acquire several credit cards with dangerously high credit limits, alongside other cultural drivers, has resulted in an American citizenry drowning in consumer debt and thereby needing to work longer hours just to stay afloat—especially where wages are stagnant or declining. The fact that developers keep building ever larger homes and that banks continue to offer easy mortgages for them, at least in North America, means that homeowners spend more of their days dreaming up ways to fill their domestic environs with things, time that can no longer be spent on local forms of socializing. Such factors combine to produce not only everyday lives ever more defined by individual financial precarity and longer work hours but a culture increasingly preoccupied with stuff.
Specialized job markets and educational opportunities pull people out of their communities to pursue a livelihood and a career. These patterns are exacerbated to the extent that financial capital and large corporations are increasingly mobile. Feeling little obligation to the communities in which they are located, many firm owners are quick to uproot workers or move factories and offices to take advantage of tax and subsidy deals elsewhere. Contemporary demands for worker mobility destabilizes local social belonging. Indeed, citizens who frequently change residences have fewer ties with neighbors and a lower sense of community, which in turn contributes to an individualistic ethos that promotes future mobility and drives an attraction to chain and big-box stores.76 Greater economic instability, more work hours, and tighter budgets mean less time and psychic energy left over to devote to civic involvement.
Things could be different. Technological societies could better support thick community and the development of citizens as communitarian beings. I have mentioned potentially more compatible technologies throughout the last three chapters: walkable mixed-use neighborhoods, locally governed community infrastructures, third places, neighborhood-level recreation, nondistributed heating systems, and community policing, among others. As promising as these alternative technologies might be, their promise is insufficient to ensure broader deployment and use. A constellation of factors nudge citizens’ toward networked individualism, despite any desires they might have to live otherwise and, indeed, often prior to them even being able to reflect on what a desirable way of life would look like. These factors have deep roots in the political, cultural, and economic structure of technological societies. The aim of the next section of this book is to analyze how citizens might begin to strategize around the myriad social barriers to more communitarian technologies.