The article doesn't mention of "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam, which explored pretty much the same idea, a.k.a. the value of the 'room', (which for Putnam was 'social capital'), and its rapid decline. Bowling Alone was published in 2000, looking back to 1950, and noted the massive, synchronous decline of civic participation in pretty much everything non-work-related across American society. Every kind of gentle, recurrent, voluntary activity you can imagine was on a pretty steep decline even before the smartphone or widespread adoption of the Internet