Thing 1-B

As I read through the Web 2.0 materials that Caroline helpfully prepared for us I was struck by the consistent use two terms. Namely community and interactivity. I don't know that these terms were used in their absolute forms but any number of synonyms and related terms were deployed.

This put me in the mode of a fascinating book that came out by a political scientist named Robert Putnam a few years back entitled Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital. Professor Putnam's thesis in a nutshell was that as America became increasingly more diverse and dynamic (which he feels is an almost unmitigated good) an unfortunate byproduct was the breakdown of traditional civic and social structures that had often nurtured ideas of civic good, Civic Pride, shared responsibility, and (their really is no other way to say it) a virtuous, community based life. Instead, what was replaced was an often isolated, cut off culture in which people withdraw from community. His title came from the observation that while the number of individuals who bowled had increased over the past 20 years, the number of league bowlers had shrank to almost nothing. Bowling in leagues versus bowling alone become a metaphor the whole book hinges on about the whole loss of community and social cohesion of American Society in the latter half of the 20th century.

This isn't a post designed to weight the merits and demerits of his argument (suffice it so say I disagree with some of his ideas, even as I find the basic thesis compelling), but instead to point out that in many ways Web 2.0 seems almost tailor made to serve as a fill-in, a kind of proxy community that has been lost. My mother finds twitter and facebook to be completely useless (why should I care if a friend of mine just watched a movie and for some reason wants to tell me about it?) and while I agree that much of social networking is utterly prosaic and banal, another part of me thinks that, trivial though it be, the need to share ones life with others is an important, and often overlooked, aspect of the human experience. Web communities allow individuals of similar likes and interests to network, communicate, share, and, yes, in many cases come to care for one another. They can nourish creativity, critiques of ideas, and opening up of new ideas to people who, without web 2.0 technology, would often never meet in real life. To use an overused cliche, it flattens the barriers of time and geography to create communities in ways that were never possible before.

It is true of course that much of what goes on in interactive communities and web 2.0 applications is, well, crap. But remember Sturgeon's Law (click link for more). 90% of everthing is crap, or at least nothing to get excited over. But their is no doubt for me that in that 10% where true quality lies Web 2.0 applications have at least the possiblity of allowing individuals to recapture that sense of community that was lost over much of the past decades.

P.S. My open mindedness ends at Twitter though. In twitter I am still a "get off of my lawn you kids" stick in the mud.