A thread about the latest iteration of American decline: "Like Putnam’s beloved bowling alleys, cinemas are an example of the decline of semiweekly gatherings in the United States" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/how-2020-shattered-shared-reality/617398/ /1

I prefer the link between social capital & media that @DKThomp makes to Putnam's bowling leagues because it invokes the work of Benedict Anderson's concept of imagined communities. /2

The Bible printed in a common vernacular instead of Latin gave rise to a national identity through a shared experience of reading scripture. /3

But the shared experience was imagined, much like an audience watching the nightly news about the Vietnam War or reading the morning newspaper. We *believe* we are experiencing the consumption of media in the same way, even if asynchronous. /4

The geographic scale of trust watching Walter Cronkite is much larger than a bowling league. The decline in social capital after World War II that Putnam laments coincides with the rise of a strong national identity thanks to the new medium of television. /5