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Comment by tonymet | Hacker News Reader

Cause and effect is reversed here. The trends leading to collapse of the family , neighborhoods and friendships predate facebook by at least 40 years. Bowling Alone describes the collapse covering the 80s & 90s, and the trends were 20-30 years mature by then.

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IIUC, Bowling Alone pointed the finger at TV. If you looked at time-use surveys in the 50s, versus when Putnam was writing in the late 90s, it looked like TV watching had eaten much of the time that used to be spent doing IRL social activities.

TV was one factor, along with migration/ commuting, two-income households (and now divided households), and more generally that boomers were more individualistic, though he didn't explain why really.

Those , and other factors are more influential than facebook. If anything, facebook helped remote friendships stay connected ( better than phone, letters).

Your theory is that Facebook not only had no impact on that but could have done nothing to improve things?

That seems implausible to me. I think at best you could claim that cause and effect are quite tangled here.

I wouldn't say no impact, but a trailing impact. They understood the cultural changes demanding new ways for people to status signal and maintain connections with friends & family.

That's what I mean about reversing cause and effect. There are larger causes (see my other comment below) that Facebook was innovative to take advantage of.

I thoroughly disagree. Did Facebook take advantage of existing issues? Yes. Did they magnify those issues while creating new ones? Absolutely yes.

fair enough, but among the movement between around 1970-2020 -- what were the top 3 factors in degradation of communities? would facebook be in the top 3?

I don't understand why that matters. We can't act in 1970. We can act today. So we should be looking at biggest current problems and the highest-ROI fixes.

taking action requires understanding the leading factors that lead to the decline. If you only see one train car , you won't know that the engine needs to be alerted to stop 2 miles down the track.

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