COMMONWEAL is a laboratory for you to learn more about SOCIAL CAPITAL and community.
Social capital is the glue that holds our society together and over the past half century it has been dissolving. Complete the COMMONWEAL labs below to better understand social capital in your community and to, just maybe, glue parts of it back together.
Be creative. Use whatever resources you have: pen and paper, audio recorder, still digital camera, or video camera to document your response to each lab.
Every time you complete a lab, post your response on the COMMENT LINK below each lab.
If you are responding to multiple labs, you might choose to make your own blog, web site, or wiki of all your labs, then send a link of your site to commonwealblog@gmail.com and we'll share all your work on our blogroll here at Commonweal.
Now complete the Community Inventory below and then get busy on the labs!
COMMONWEAL
COMMUNITY INVENTORY
Before we start our labs, let's complete the following social capital inventory on how connected you are with your community.
Give yourself 1 point for each of the following things that are true of you
1. Attended a public meeting in the past year (school board, town council, zoning commission)
2. Attended a political rally/event in the past year
3. Could go to your regular grocery store and would probably (Fifty-fifty chance) see someone you know
4. Regularly attend synagogue/temple/mosque/church
5. You have less than a fifteen minute commute each day, each way
6. Know the names of one half of the people on your block
7. Play on a sports team, go to the gym, or are involved in an artistic organization
8. Are a member of a club/organization/volunteer group that meets regularly
9. Go out more than one night a week (movie, dinner, dancing, parties, bowling)
10. If your car broke down at 3 pm on a typical Wednesday, you could have a ride home in half an hour
Now add up your points and see how plugged-in you are. Your score is below.
Points Level
10 – 8 Social Capitalist Extraordinaire
7 – 5 Civically Engaged
4 – 2 Out Of Network
1 – 0 Home Alone
Feel free to brag about your score on the poll to the right.
Lab #1
One of the main reasons for declining social capital is suburban sprawl (caused by cars and cheap gas). Sprawl is bad for social capital, the environment, and according to the architect James Howard Kunstler, for our humanity.
According to social capital guru, Robert Putnam, every ten minutes of commute time diminishes social capital by ten percent. Make a video, audio report, or photo essay about sprawl in your community with five solutions you conceive to counteract local sprawl.
Lab #2
The Amish do not use technology that they believe will weaken their community.
Consider the effect of modern technology on community and society. Imagine what life would be like without individual phones, television sets, and internet technology (you couldn't be reading this!) Live your life without a cell phone for 31 hours straight.
On the COMMENTS link below, post a photograph of your lonely cell phone along with your reactions to escaping from your cell, your ideas about how dependent you are on technology, and a comparison between your time with and without your phone.
Lab #3
Nietzsche said that, "sin is that which separates us." Media is a complicated thing (it can illuminate, educate, entertain, and it can distract us from important matters), but when considering its overall impact on community, think about whether media (television, internet, radio, newspapers, etc.) tends to bring us together or pull us apart.
Go one week without media. Document your life and record your impressions of what your life was like without media (I know, I know. You will have to use media on a non-media day. Life is full of paradoxes) and post your lab to your blog.
Lab #4
At the heart of social capital is trust.
Communities, towns, states, and countries that are rich in social capital have high levels of trust. Trust makes the world go round, and specifically it is necessary for economic, political, and social systems to function. At the heart of any healthy community is a high amount of trust. In 1970, 75% of Americans trusted each other. Today, only 30% of Americans say people can be trusted. Does it matter?
Some observers worry that with declining trust in America today it will be hard to work together to solve the vast societal problems we face.
Do you think that most people trust each other?
Go out into the world with a camera, sketch pad, notebook, tape recorder, or video camera and investigate trust. Here are some ideas, but you can approach this in many different ways. You could interview people, survey them about their level of trust, set up an experiment where you “drop” a dollar, scarf, notebook, or something valuable on the floor in a library and see if people return it to you (this might get expensive), or ask people at the mall if you can borrow their cell phone to call home. Whatever you do, investigate trust in your community and report your results.
Lab #5
In the early 1990s, after hearing a story about "Material Girl" Madonna's latest self-promotional enterprise, photojournalist Peter Menzel had a vision: Rather than take viewers into the mansions of the rich or the "cribs" of MTV celebrities, he wanted to capture the material life of average families around the globe. His resulting book, Material World, offers extraordinary images of families in front of their dwellings with all (or nearly all) of their possessions. Look at some of the pictures from the book and think about how materialism effects community. Consider how the pursuit of individual goods and possessions can effect community good. Take a picture of all of your possessions outside of your residence.
