The Real User Interface: Recovering Our Neighborhoods
Today, we return to our series on the “first act” of The Anxious Generation: the loss of community. (The second act is the loss of the play-based childhood. The third act is the rise of the phone-based childhood.) In our first post, we discussed Robert Putnam’s critical work on the decline of social capital and trust, driven partly by new individualizing technologies (such as television) and dwindling participation in local and communal activities. As communities weakened and trust eroded, so did the play-based childhood.
In the second post, we featured an essay by Seth Kaplan, author and lecturer at Johns Hopkins who studies fragile states. In it, he argued rebuilding strong, in-person local communities is a prerequisite to restoring a play-based childhood. In a follow-up post, Seth provocatively contended that the upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is this very loss of community.
In this third post, Seth examines four factors—beyond technological change—that help explain the erosion of neighborhood communities, and crucially, how we can revive them. These include: changes in the physical landscape, decline in local institutions, individualization of religion, and shifts in our education and aspirations.
