THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Is This the ‘Anti-Social Century?’
No need to go to a movie theater if you can rent first-run movies a few weeks after they’re in the theaters. Why sit in a restaurant and wait for bad service when you can pick up your food and take it home to eat at your leisure?
“Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home,” writes Thompson. American females spend more time engaged with their pets than they do with friends.
Perhaps one of the problems is that we judge our self-imposed solitude based on a comparison to the first half of the 20th century. From 1900 to 1960, membership in churches and labor unions surged, there were more marriages than ever, and the biggest baby boom in history took place.
All kinds of gathering places were built: theaters, museums, concert halls, and playgrounds. But then something happened that gave us an excuse to withdraw. “From 1985 to 1994, active involvement in community organizations fell by nearly half,” reports Thompson.
What happened in the 1970s? Klinenberg, the sociologist, notes a shift in political priorities: The government dramatically slowed its construction of public spaces. “Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether,” he told me. Putnam points, among other things, to new moral values, such as the embrace of unbridled individualism. But he found that two of the most important factors were by then ubiquitous technologies: the automobile and the television set.
The construction of highways and interstates enabled the growth of the suburbs. The exodus was spurred by rising crime and racial tensions in the urban areas. As people moved farther away from each other, their only connection to reality became the television set.
Later, through smartphones and the internet, our children may have connected to others but not on the vital person-to-person level that leads to a healthy, adult psyche.
Jonathan Haidt is having some success weening kids off smartphones, but how will AI change life for young people in the 21st century? Can AI Be Blamed for a Teen’s Suicide?
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