GoingSolo_TheExtraordinaryRiseandSurpris.epub - (EPUB全文下载)

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ALSO BY ERIC KLINENBERG
Fighting for Air
Heat Wave
4.
PROTECTING THE SELF
NO ONE REALLY BOWLS ALONE.
The provocative phrase, from Robert Putnam’s sweeping account of the decline of civic participation in the United States, is a metaphor, not a finding (as he acknowledged). Putnam used it with great effect to dramatize the fact that participation in bowling leagues had fallen during the second half of the twentieth century, as had participation in a number of historically significant civic associations and membership groups, from the Boy Scouts to the Elks clubs and the League of Women Voters. The truth is, Americans continue bowling together, but with friends (and friends of friends) in their social network, not in formal teams or organized groups.
The distinction is important. When Bowling Alone was published in 2000, pundits and policy makers worried that families were watching TV together in their living rooms rather than interacting with each other in the public sphere. Today, our most pressing social concerns are different—and not just because we’re nostalgic about the days when family members watched TV together rather than on their own miniscreens! In the first years of the twenty-first century we’ve witnessed the rise of new forms of interpersonal engagement and civic participation, from MoveOn to MySpace, e-government programs to microlending initiatives such as Kiva. We are, as headlines tell us: “Addicted to Social Media,” “Trapped in a World Wide Web,” “Caught in the Net.” Our most burning questions about the nature of contemporary society are not about isolation, but the problem of being hyperconnected, or of living with what the technology guru Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention,” because we are so deeply embedded in the personal, professional, and social activities we perform online.
All of this should affect the way we understand how and why we live alone today. Whether or not we go solo, most of us are immersed in one or more social worlds, and today a growing number of critics have begun to worry that we are in too deep. We are experiencing “the end of solitude,” writes the essayist William Deresiewicz, who claims that in contemporary culture “we live exclusively in relation to others” and that too many of us find it “impossible to be alone.” The sociologist Dalton Conley goes further, arguing that we are witnessing the death of the individual and the birth of “intraviduals”: busy professionals whose lives are dedicated to “m ............

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