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USA Today, Robert Putnam Wrong About Millennials

An otherwise interesting recent USA Today piece on the Millennial generation unfortunately contained some tired-ass conventional wisdom:

Volunteering is rising, says Robert Putnam, author of the 2000 book Bowling Alone, which is about the breakdown of social connections and the decline of civic engagement. But he says civic involvement has been declining in every generation.

"Everybody who has worked in this field has talked about this increasing youth volunteering," says Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard. "It's not true of all other measures. It's not true for voting, interest in politics or joining organizations."

Barnard, though, says he reads newspapers and magazines and is very interested in politics and in voting.

Though he may be unusual in that respect, researchers would see much about his life as pretty typical of a generation in motion.

I'm a fan of the historal lens Putnam brings to bear in Bowling Alone, and I think his analysis of how mass media consumption has impacted social organization is critical to understanding the true scale of the change that the internet is driving. However, he's just plain wrong about political engagement. I don't know what the scene is like at Harvard, but outside the People's Republic of Cambridge, we're voting up a motherfucking storm.

Oh well, at least it's nice to know that people a little closer to the fray (like candidates) are getting the message:

Contenders for governor are testing strategies to seek young voter support. They're hosting hip-hop and r&b concerts as well as meet-the-candidate parties at martini bars and college-age nightclubs. Their Web sites include blogs, podcasts and live chats. They're handing out campaign literature on computer disks and blasting attacks via e-mail. And they've placed their candidate profiles where young people will see them on Web sites popular with the college crowd, like facebook.com and myspace.com.

"It's definitely a demographic worth pursuing," said Jeff Sadosky, 28, a spokesman for the Republican Party of Florida.

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July 11th, 2006 6:02am
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Ivory Tower

Submitted by Michael Connery on Tue, 2006-07-11 11:19.

Interesting. Putnam stands on my bookshelf as one of the best books to read if you're trying to understand why this whole interweb/community/participatory culture-democracy is important. Mostly for the reasons you already state.

That said, Bowling Along came out before the turnaround in youth voting, and before the internet really picked up steam as a participatory medium. So it's a little dated in that respect. The man clearly needs to adjust his data set. Maybe he should walk around campus and check out what's the students think (PDF) at his own university.

I also think that his view of what counts as civic participation - particularly the notion of "joining organizations" - is out of date in an age where participation can take place outside the limits prescribed by geographic area.

Robert Putnam vindicated, USA Today to blame.

Submitted by Fred Gooltz on Tue, 2007-02-06 12:54.

Alex UA was with me and Krebs and some other folks last year for the National Conference on Citizenship where Putnam spoke. In his rockstar keynote address, Putnam said not only was youth involvement and voting up for the first time in 40 years, but that it was maybe the one truly great thing to happen to the US since 9/11. He attributes it to 9/11 itself, but I disagree, I attribute it to George W. Bush. He was the motivating factor for me, at least.

Sharon Jayson, the USA Today author Koenig pointed to clearly never interviewed Putnam. She merely took a few sentences from Putnam's 2000 book, Bowling Alone. Which was published of course, as we all know, before the shit hit the fan. Lazy, stupid journalists.

Anyway, in his lecture, which everyone should totally read, it starts on page 10. (PDF). He says:

Now, I want to say just a word about the good news that actually also emerges from this most recent period. It has to do with the emergence, which I now believe is real (when we spoke last year I was not sure it was real, but now I am pretty sure) among America’s young people, of a 9/11 generation.

And even though the spike after 9/11 has disappeared frankly, people of our age are exactly at the same level of civic engagement, joining, trusting and volunteering and so on, almost unchanged from pre-9/11 levels. The exceptions are the young people who were in high school or maybe in early years of college at the time of 9/11, and there we now do see a clear 9/11 generation.

You can see this very clearly in the data. We all know that voting was up in 2004, for most Americans, but the spurt in voting last year was much greater among young people than it was among older people. Similarly in 2002, relative to older people, younger people were voting more than they had in the past.

So, that's great news. It's great news because I have long said that if we could begin to change the attitude towards politics and government and social activities and community life among our young people, it would have a revitalizing effect across the whole of the population over the long run. Of course, in the short run, our national averages are being held down by the older folks like me and like many people in this room who haven't changed that much, even after 9/11.

These young people, for the first time in many years are feeling a sense of "we": "We are in this together." That's what they're saying. They are not a collection of self-interested "I"s. [exclusive MP3]

Putnam then went on to explain how this huge mass of what will be the next Great Generation, could either save the country or end it. He fears that if the young wave joins the Fourth Great Awakening, we're fucked.

But like I said, I think he's read the motivating factors wrong. He notes that young, engaged people feel a sense of "we." Sharing is not a conservative value. Also, when I was VoteMobbing in Ohio, fencesitters who caved and said, "Okay you're right, I'll register and vote and hold my nose and vote for Kerry" did so because they fucking HATED George Bush. Not because 9/11 was awful.

I wrote about Putnam's lecture and more about the Fourth Great Awakening here. God, I hope I'm right.

Putnam is scheduled to speak again this year. A good task for the Rappaports might be to get their report on young people voting into Putnam's hands before this year's NCOC.

I agree 100%

Submitted by Alex UA on Tue, 2007-02-06 13:21.

That the biggest factor is Bush. But, I also think that us under 30 folks are facing a world of problems that just didn’t exist 20 years ago. Health care costs are through the roof, college is more and more expensive, we’re getting buried under a huge debt, the job market sucks and there are few opportunities for a “career”, etc., etc. If we can be fooled into believing that the party of, by, and for the Wealthy and the Wacky has any sort of plan for truly dealing with our problems, than we deserve to go the way of the dinosaurs.