America Offline and Online

In the 19th century, there was a rule of thumb that a county seat should be within a day's buggy ride for every citizen. We need to live by a similar rule now – a rule of thumb that pushes for physical closeness to political power through social communities.

The 'net is disrupting some old channels for political power and offering new kinds of connections as well, leading to lots of big, exciting thinking about how this may restructure society. Without an aggressive effort, however, I worry that most of this energy will go into fundraising, list-building, and maybe some online community building. These aren't bad things, but in the face of the Great American Loneliness and the Great American Powerlessness, I hope that the disruptive power of the internet might serve to create a new form of voluntary association: offline communities based on online connections but rooted in public places.

There's pretty good evidence that humans actively enjoy belonging to ritualized, secular societies that meet pretty regularly, weekly and monthly. Once upon a time, so many of us were engaged in local organizations with regularized membership and leadership roles that an observer wrote, "Here then we have the great American safety-valve – we are a nation of presidents." (My thanks to Theda Skocpol for unearthing that gem, and much of the research I am now citing.) Even as late as the '50s, there were more than 20 federated organizations which each counted between one and twelve percent of all Americans as their members. Think of the AFL-CIO, the Free Masons, the American Legion, the YMCA, the Elks, and so on.

These federated organizations had strong local structures, visits from traveling organizers but relatively little of what we would call "training" today – more networking and information sharing – and no federally funded local staff.

There are lots of explanations for the decline of participation in civic life (start with Skocpol's Diminished Democracy and then read Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone). Among the reasons Skocpol notes include: the intense professionalization of non-profits (high expectations of staffing and training), the elite flight from cross-class associations (in part due to histories of racism and sexism), the new development of foundations that meant membership wasn't necessary to raise money, the Vietnam war, which put a wedge between elites and others; the rising number of women in the workforce; and the shift in the center of political power to the federal government (leading to more emphasis on federal lobbying efforts).

In searching for salves, people today tend to either focus on a) recreating large, federated political organizations with local chapters, or b) stimulating social capital through non-political platforms for community life. (In crude form, Skocpol is seen as representative of the former view, Putnam of the latter.) In this essay, I want to poke around ways in which the internet could be used for doing both of these things, by suggesting how it could work as an organizing tool for more vibrant, federated national organizations like the Democratic National Committee or the American Civil Liberties Union.

Join In, Turn On, Turnout

Why does this matter? Local involvement in community organizations – be they explicitly political or not – correlates with much greater sense of power over political life. Sidney Verba and Gary Almond have shown, in a multi-decade, five-country study that participation – even passive participation – in local voluntary organizations appears to directly lead to greater satisfaction with government. Interestingly, the satisfaction seemed to result from the participation in the voluntary association – not from the political outcomes matching the individuals' hopes. So, as we manage to revive civic life, maybe we can also turn at least some of the anti-government tide.