Category: Virtual Book Tour

Here I try to make the case that my generation is actually good at building community. Mainly I take aim at Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, where he argues that this generation of young adults has not done its part in creating “social capital.” It’s true that we’ve not joined the community groups our grandparents belonged to but we’ve done something more interesting and harder to document. We’ve created community among networks of friends. This has led to what I call “social dark matter.” The community building that goes on among these networks of friends is difficult to document but it creates a force that binds together whole cities. I cited Critical Mass as an example of how this social dark matter can suddenly become visible. Since the book came out there have been more examples, like flash mobs, Friendster and Tribe.net We seem to be coming to understand how these loose networks of friends can have an impact in the world.

In this chapter I try to figure out how groups of friends help the individual become their best self. Some amateur scholars helped me understand what Aristotle meant by “friendship in the good.” I also talk about how my group helped support our friend Nik Weinstein as he created one of the largest lighting installations in the world.

The second chapter starts with my dawning understanding that the initial article I wrote for the New York Times Magazine got the idea of the urban tribe all wrong. The groups weren’t “tight knit” as I claimed but much looser and more porous. Hundreds of people who filled out a survey on my site alerted me to this mistake. These groups both protected us from the swirl of city life and connected us to it as well. In the end of the chapter I write about Robin Dunbar’s research in which he suggests that we gossip as a form of grooming each other and expressing solidarity. We can maintain larger groups than apes because we can gossip with (aka groom) more than one person at a time.

The book starts at the annual arts festival Burning Man. It was at Burning Man that I suddenly saw that my group of friends added up to more than the sum of the individual relationships. It was a (drug-free) insight that started me thinking about writing the article that led to the book. In the first chapter I also begin to describe my tribe and its influence in my life. There are some pictures of my group here. I also begin to look at some data on the marriage delay. Much of that came from The Rutgers Marriage project and from talking to the charming and smart Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, who I don’t always agree with but always enjoy interviewing.

Here are some chapter by chapter links relating to my book Urban Tribes. In the book I try to write in the style of the best conversations I’ve had with my smartest friends. As I say in the book:

The links, chapter by chapter, should prove this point.