INTERVIEW: MIT’s Ethan Zuckerman on ‘Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection’ – Next City

INTERVIEW: MIT’s Ethan Zuckerman on ‘Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection’ – Next City: Robert Putnam of Bowling Alone for years has been bemoaning how the Internet is going to separate us and how we’re losing the social fabric of mixing in public. But he’s done recent work that is much, much less discussed, because it’s really uncomfortable. He’s found that when you’re living in a city where you’re a minority, you’re probably going to hunker down. You’re probably not going to mix much with your neighbors. You’re probably going to spend a lot of time watching TV. Confronted with high degrees of cultural diversity, people, for the most part, don’t seem to step up to the challenge and meet their neighbors. In many ways, they hide from them. A lot of cities that have the highest degrees of civic participation are pretty ethnically homogenous.