I'm tired of hearing people complain that so many don't read newspapers or vote or participate in their communities. The belief that Americans have become apathetic, complacent conformists is accepted as conventional wisdom, when, in fact, I believe it is about to reverse and correct in a dramatic fashion. I would go so far as to say the death of newspapers and disengagement of traditional forms of participation is more a recognition that those forms are irrelevant to people today and that the impulse to participate drives people to more effective channels. We're mourning the death of the irrelevant while new forms are flourishing.

But first, let's look at the real symptoms of change.

Robert Putnam considered the decline of community in his book Bowling Alone and concluded that generational change and television were largely responsible for a decline in civic engagement, colorfully metaphorized by the decline of bowling leagues. The key "surprise" in his book was the illustration that decline in civic participation was only slighty due to the usual supects of work/sprawl/lifestyle--my own assessment that the reason I was not more involved in my community was that the schedule of commuting and working in Boston left me no time to be "present" in my community...but I was wrong. The biggest factor in the decline of "involvement" was simply the passing of generations...the fact that a large group of people--boomers--replaced the "greatest generation" as they moved through life stages, and these boomers had different lifestyles.

My law professor, David Skover, taught a media seminar while writing a book, the Death of Discourse, where he expanded on the media theories of Marshal McLuhan, and more recently Neil Postman, to illustrate that our consumption of passive media, like television, was fundamentally changing the way we think. Al Gore picked up on this thread in his book The Assault on Reason where he bemoaned the decline of civility in conversation and the increasing impossibility of rational argument in a culturally-politicized world.

Doom and gloom. We're all going stupid and irrational. How many more seasons of Survivor could there be?

But other things are happening that change the world.

• Our work lives have broken down traditional models of compartmentalization...we live and work in a "bursty, always on" style that is frustrating to navigate, but "better" in many ways once we figure out how to manage the transitions. Richard Florida developed a whole economic development worldview around the idea that the changing nature of work--the fact that more and more of us are engaged in "creative class" type work activities is changing the way we live.
• A massive cohort of collaborative, optimistic young people is entering the workforce. Generation Y, the NetGen, whatever you want to call them, represent a massive generational change that, consistent with Putnam's theories, has to exert a big impact on our society.
• The medium is changing. Television was the medium that was diagnosed as having changed us so profoundly. Not even 10 years ago, we sat and stared and watched the drivel that was beamed to us from mass media producers and we consumed a steady diet of mind-numbing idiocy that anesthetized us to our dissatisfaction. But it began to fade...and the volume was turned up until we are now served an unbelievable diet of violent obscenity that is necessary to waken our dulled senses. But increasingly, we are tuning out. In a time of transition, it is hard to see the edge of change, but instead of wondering how far they can go, we should be wondering why they have had to go so far to hold our attention. The answer is that it is failing because we need something better.

The new medium is collaborative and participatory. The new medium is expressed in terms of "social media" and a society of publishers...where people turn off their televisions to go write a blog. In a time of transition, some things seem ridiculous...how can updating my Facebook status be more socially-responsible than sitting down to read the New York Times? But it WILL be this and more...and it will change us all...but that is a post for another day...