Word: communale
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This is no abstract investigation. Goleman is looking for antidotes to restore "civility to our streets and caring to our communal life." He sees practical applications everywhere for how companies should decide whom to hire, how couples can increase the odds that their marriages will last, how parents should raise their children and how schools should teach them. When street gangs substitute for families and schoolyard insults end in stabbings, when more than half of marriages end in divorce, when the majority of the children murdered in this country are killed by parents and stepparents, many of whom say they...
What, until recently, most 'zines had in common was that they were as non-commercial, communal and idealistic as the Internet itself. But all that changed with the advent last year of HotWired, the sassy online sister of Wired, and later of Pathfinder, Time Warner's mammoth collection of magazines-come-to-the-Net. Advertisers sensed new possibilities. And why not? The typical Internet user is a Madison Avenue parfait: mid-30s, hyper educated, mostly male, and with plenty of disposable income and free time...
...homelife with a work life fairly gracefully, and in a richly social context. When they gather food, their children stay either with them or with aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins or lifelong friends. When they're back at the village, child care is a mostly public task--extensively social, even communal. The anthropologist Marjorie Shostak wrote of life in an African hunter-gatherer village, "The isolated mother burdened with bored small children is not a scene that has parallels in !Kung daily life...
Relief from TV's isolating and at times depressing effects may come from more communal technologies. The inchoate Internet is already famous for knitting congenial souls together. And as the capacity of phone lines expands, the Net may allow us to, say, play virtual racketball with a sibling or childhood friend in a distant city. But at least in its current form, the Net brings no visual (much less tactile) contact, and so doesn't fully gratify the social machinery in our minds. More generally the Net adds to the information overload, whose psychological effects are still unknown but certainly...
...that are imaginable--reforms that somewhat blunt modernization's antisocial effects--will hardly be easy or cheap. Workplace-based day care costs money. Ample and inviting public parks cost money. And it costs money to create good public schools--which by diverting enrollment from private schools offer the large communal virtue of making a child's neighborhood peers and schoolyard friends one and the same. Yikes: taxes! Taxes, as Newt Gingrich and others have patiently explained, slow economic growth. True enough. But if economic growth places such a strain on community to begin with--a fact that Gingrich seems...