For the past week, I’ve been having a hard time tearing my eyes off Civic Life in the Information Age by Stefanie Sanford. It is a very accessibly written (but still academic) account of Stefanie’s exploration at the intersection of a few trends that the people in this blog might know a thing or two about. She sums this up as the following list of “problems”:
- Bowling alone [referring to Robert Putnam's 2000 book on declining social capital]
- Generational change
- the Internet
- Technology and Community.
- Politics and young people.
She then breaks down theories on citizenship: what behaviours are expected of “good citizens”? How do those expectations get formed, or where do they come from? She then zeroes in on the topic of her book: so-called Generation X, and the terrible rep they have for being citizens, then plunges into asking whether these characterizations of Gen Xers as lazy, self-obsessed, and cynical, are actually true. She talked to 40 people from different walks of life in Austin’s high-tech community, to get their general feelings on how they felt about citizenship, government, the future, their role in that future, the Internet and news media, and their voting and community participation patterns.
I must say, after having spent a few days plunged in the descriptions of the Cyber Democrats, Wireheads, Tech Elites and Trailing Xers, that I was hard pressed not to think of people I’ve encountered in the tech circles in Toronto and in Vancouver – and myself – as Sanford was describing and conjecturing at her respondents’ motivations, logics and reactions.
While doing so, Sanford questions (as others have) the validity of looking at social capital as being in decline. If you’re comparing the way things are happening now to the way they were happening in the 1950’s, then, well, yeah, things aren’t happening exactly the same way. But, Sanford argues, this just means that the ways in which people express their citizenship have shifted. “We still bowl, ” she writes in the concluding chapter, “We still gather. But we gather differently, in ways that are more consistent with how we live and work.” (emphasis in original, 159)
She also has a genius concept that captures perfectly what I was trying to articulate in my own research – that instead of forming trust based on a series of long-term, regular activities, people such as those who participated in Toronto Transit Camp do something a little different. Sanford calls this “just-in-time” social capital, where people respond to a community need, form a temporary group to solve that need, then disband.
Most interestingly for me, Sanford brings in Richard Florida, who I’ve never read directly, but who Mark has talked about, and whose thesis I’ve become aware of second-hand. I like that she’s acknowledging the difference that emphases on creativity and fun bring to the atmosphere and nature of work, in a way that most of the other things I’ve been reading on social capital and civic participation hasn’t thus far. It alters – and in some way, does away with – the sense in which work must be differentiated from contributions to community. Why not make doing good, just what you do?
She’s also got a crazy section on how, if you look at where the Creative Class is and where social capital is according to Putnam, the places with the most creative-class people and the fastest growing economies have the lowest levels of social capital. And vice versa. She interprets this as basically the creative-class not caring at all for the old boys’ clubs strongholds, “particularly if assuming leadership in such hierarchies is based on seniority or time-based ‘paying your dues.’” (165)
I’m still working on the last chapter – the most important part, the conclusions! – but this book gets the rare ‘recommended reading’ stamp from me, from anyone who’s interested in volunteer organizations, politics, technology, or anyone under the age of 45. (Rare because I hardly read entire books anymore, much less feel like telling anyone about them.)
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And did you notice what she said on page 190 about John McCain and Barack Obama? And keep in mind, with a publishing date sometime in early 2007 she must have written this fully two years prior to the election. Interesting indeed!