Strategies for the Digital Age: Beyond Mocking the Clueless

..In Robert Putnam’s fascinating book Bowling Alone he describes the way in which the threads of civil society and of trust frayed during the 20th century – and offered a convincing social science case that the implications were profoundly negative for our culture. But the book was not a depressive one. Putnam pointed back to the turn of the 20th century. Then, as now, people noticed their society changing around them — industrialization, the acceleration of migration to cities, urban isolation. But Putnam points out that this prompted an extraordinary entrepreneurialism in civil society. Groups were founded that today seem quaint to us — the Kiwanis. the Rotarians and so on — all aimed specifically at solving this failure of civil society. The message was not, in other words, that these problems would self correct through markets and technology. It was that we would need an entrepreneurialism outside the market — one that experimented with institutions and communities to solve the problems of the day. For me, a glance at AP’s DRM business plan prompts the same thought. Some of the functions that newspapers now perform are going to be located elsewhere in society — in universities, in foundations, in government, in blogs. Some of that will happen spontaneously — but a lot of it will not unless we innovate in social organization the same way the citizens of the early 20th century did to meet the problems of urbanization.

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