I read Robert D. Putnam ‘s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community when it was first published (in 2000) and one of my reactions then was that his use of the bowling metaphor was limited to bowling alleys and their customers. The fact that more people were bowling alone indicates that there has been a “collapse” of interaction within human communities. I was wrong. Very wrong.

Think about it.

How many people are involved in a telephone call, sending or receiving an email, texting a message, or visiting a website? Usually one and no more than two.

How many people travel in a vehicle (other than a bus) about 80% of the time? One.

Today, more individuals are involved in electronic (i.e. social media) communities than in traditional communities other than workplaces and churches. That is, communities within which there is direct and frequent personal interaction.

Based on what I have observed, the largest and fastest-growing communities are based on electronic rather than face-to-face connection and participation. They demonstrate what I characterize as “virtual humanity.”

My guess and — yes — fear is that the scope and depth of Putnam’s metaphor will have even greater relevance in months and years to come.

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Robert Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard where he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses. Raised in a small town in the Midwest and educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale, he has served as Dean of the Kennedy School of Government. The London Sunday Times has called him “the most influential academic in the world today.” He has written fourteen books, including the aforementioned Bowling Alone and, more recently, Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a study of promising new forms of social connectedness. His previous book, Making Democracy Work, was praised by the Economist as “a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto and Weber.” Both Making Democracy Work and Bowling Alone are among the most cited publications in the social sciences worldwide in the last half century. He is currently working on three major empirical projects: (1) Inequality and opportunity: a growing class gap among American young people and the implications for social mobility; (2) The changing role of religion in the United Kingdom and the US; and (3) The social consequences of hard times in the United Kingdom and the US.