FINAL PROJECT!

For our final project, we had to read from Robert Putnam’s book “Bowling Alone.” Putnam argues that the degree of social capital in America has declined since the 1950’s. By this he means, “Americans have been dropping out in droves, not merely from political life, but from organized community life more generally” (Putnam 64). Without engaging in activities such as bowling leagues, PTA meetings, and other community events, he thinks that the level of creating and maintaining bonds amongst people has been on a dramatic downfall. However, our group wanted to disagree with Putnam’s theory. In our project, we wanted to portray that not only are youth still engaging in social relations and social capital, but they are engaging in different forms of interaction that are still capable of leading to new opportunities and promoting new relationships. Putnam states that “Trends in numbers of voluntary associations nationwide are not a reliable guide to trends in social capital” (Putnam 53). However, ask any of the youth on this campus who are involved in various volunteer organizations and events and I’m sure that they will disagree that the volunteer work they are doing is not making a difference in social gain. To depict our new theory, we first went to the dorms where we found a group of kids playing the interactive video game, Age of Empires. When we interviewed them, they told us how they gained just as much interacting on the internet as they would doing any other face to face activity. They told us how they were able to talk to kids in other countries, and the level of communication that they experienced was no different than going to the bars on a Friday night. Our next stop was the bowling alley. We went to Western Bowl in Champaign and interviewed some of the workers and bowlers. When we talked to one of the bar tenders that worked at the bar in the bowling alley, he completely agreed with our theory. He stated that he had been working there for many years now and he had not noticed a decline in participation. He supported our idea that even though many people are engaging in interaction via the internet, they are still partaking in activities offline. The only person that we had that disagreed with us was a man who told us his son’s girlfriend just broke up with him over facebook. He refused to accept that talking over the internet was a form of interaction, and told us that the social capital exchanged between youth was definitely declining. The next person we interviewed was my informatics 202 professor, Lori Kendall. From being in her class, I knew that she was very involved with interaction taking place on the internet and was a big fan of it. I thought that I could get more out of her that directly supported what we were trying to get across. However, I’m sure that with all of her scholarly background and knowledge concerning the subject, she could not completely agree one way or the other. We still got a lot of useful information from her interview though. For our final piece of footage, we went to the Union and filmed the bowling alley during a time when no one was there. We wanted to show that people are still going to the bowling alley such as when it was packed at Western Bowl, but that they are also doing other things when they are not at “bowling leagues, PTA meetings, or involved in community work” as Putnam referenced. It worked out well because even though no one was bowling at the time, there were a lot of kids playing Dance Dance revolution which perfectly supported our thoughts that people are engaging in more technology based activities. Overall, it was not very hard to get the footage for our film. We decided to make a brochure to go along with the video documentary so that people would have something tangible to look at while watching the movie. I think that an idea always leaves a greater impression when people are able to think back on it later and reexamine what they learned. Sara and I did all of the filming and created the brochure, so Bill was willing to do all of the editing of the film. Overall, the final project was a very enjoyable one. We did not have as much freedom as we did with the other projects since we had to base it on a selected theory but it was still fun to go around and collect information from different locations.