Robert Putnam

speaker

197 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard Feb 2025

Robert Putnam’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Bulwark Daily · Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations · 12 Feb 2025 podcast

I'm doing great. And as you did, please call me Bob. Nobody who knows me calls me Robert. So it's useful if I get a call on my cell phone and they say, Robert, I just hang up because they can't possibly know me. So Bob it is.

Yes, I'm glad you said that. I didn't. But yes, I agree with you.

First of all, our connections with other people, all sorts of connections, connections with our friends and our family and with the community and with bowling leagues and so on. have basically been, all of them, trust in other people, all of them have been going down roughly since the mid-1960s. Way before, iPhones were invented way before.

So the basic trend can't be caused by these things we carry around. A question is whether social media, I'm going to simplify it to social media, can make up for the fact that we're no longer bowling together. Are they better than bowling leagues? Or worse than bowling leagues, if I can put it that way.

And at the beginning, around in the first decade or so of this century, many people claimed that social media were going to... You know, they were going to be great. Better than sliced bread. They were going to bring world peace and so on. The data didn't show that. And gradually, the data began to question whether social media were...

as good as, or maybe even worse than, face-to-face connections. And that was the way the scientific evidence was tending. It may be nice to be on Facebook, but it's not making up for the declines in real face-to-face connections. Then in 2020, we had COVID, and we had a big global experiment in which we couldn't be face-to-face, but we still could Zoom. And that gave us a nice test.

Well, how about it? Is zooming with grandma better than hugging grandma or not? And I can tell you when that verdict became universal, namely November 25th, 2020, and people all over the country said, no, I'm sorry, hugging grandma was much better than this.

In any event. Allow me, I want to go just a little bit further because describing this as an either-or choice, either we can meet face-to-face or we can meet virtually, is false. And I want to use here the metaphor of an alloy, A-L-L-O-Y. An alloy is a mixture of two separate elements, that is, you know, copper and tin. And if you put copper and tin together and stir them up and heat it and so on,

I never can remember whether it's bronze or brass, but you get something different from either the tin or the copper. Now, most of our connections, most of our networks today in the real world are simultaneously virtual and real. My wife and I see each other all the time. We live in the same place. But I often send her a text message or even an email saying, saying, come in here.

Come in here means moving to the next room. I want to show you something. And that just captures the fact that my connections with my wife are mostly face-to-face, but also virtual. And that's true universally of everybody. I bet you don't know anybody face-to-face that you don't communicate with via email or text or social media and vice versa.

So that means we need to think about what kind of alloys we have because an alloy in principle could be better than either of the two. We could use, let's say, Facebook to encourage people to connect really face-to-face with each other. And about 10 years ago, Mark Zuckerberg came up with the idea of actually what he called communities.

And bizarrely, he quoted, but without quotation marks, bowling alone. He said there's been a big decline, would you believe it, in going to PTA meetings and so on. And I've got the solution to that, he said. But it turned out it didn't have that effect.

And Facebook's own internal research shows that although they could do it, they know how to create this alloy that would be the best of both worlds. They don't do it. And you want to have two guesses as to why they don't do it? I was talking to actually one of the chief engineers there. And researchers at Facebook, they invited me out there to talk about social capital and Facebook.

And they know how to do it. Two guesses why they don't do it. Because it would generate less conflict.

And less conflict would mean less addiction to Facebook. And we could have an alloy that is the best of both worlds. If we have to choose, we should choose face-to-face. But we shouldn't have to choose except it's not a technological matter. It's an economic matter. Does that make sense?

Both of those, it turns out, are very complicated questions. I mean, they're clear questions, good questions, but it's not so easy to answer them. Probably, and this is what I really believe to be the answer. Actually, everything I'm telling you is going to be what I really believe the answer doesn't mean it's true. I would hope so.

There's probably a survival advantage, at least for humans, in being around other human beings. Loners. Back in the day, and by back in the day, I mean really back in our evolution, loners were much more likely to be picked off by predators. I think that's utterly clear that that's true. Probably doesn't even need much argumentation.

There is now some really early, early prehistoric work that suggests that that's true, evidentially says that's true. But that probably means that those of our ancestors who had a taste for predators, connecting with other people, and probably what that means is they had developed in such a way that they got high on endorphins, they ended up having more offspring.

And that's probably why we're biologically tuned to prefer being around other people. But now that's only half of your question. The other half is, well, so why are we now suddenly changing our minds? It's very unlikely that our basic, genetic makeup has changed. In fact, it's essentially certain it hasn't changed over the period we're talking about.

Our biology doesn't determine exactly how we behave. That's determined in part by our social environment, our social and physical environment. So if physically we're in settings that make it easy to connect with other people, and there are examples of this in the article by Derek Thompson. He quotes Eric Kleinenberg about the importance of public libraries.

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