What you said about Putnam

In the four (out of seven) group responses to Putnam and his conversation partners that I read I found these common clusters of ideas:

1. Even those scholars who disagree with RP acknowledge that he launched an important conversation about an important topic: namely how Americans interact with each other and contribute to their shared public life.
2. Some years have passed since his article was published in 1995 and the book came out in 2000; moreover, in those years there have been some significant changes that effect the continued validity of his findings.  
• The advent of electronic communication as a mode of social interaction is important and not yet well understood.  
• And, 9/11 may have stimulated a reversal of some of the trends he identified, at least among those Americans who were of an impressionable age.  (I would also be interested in the effect of Katrina.)
3. Putting aside these developments which RP could not have anticipated, criticisms of his work fall into a few types: 
• dissatisfaction with RP's definition of social capital; 
• disputes about the validity of the evidence he uses to demonstrate its decline and thus with his conclusion that there is one; 
• disagreement about the causes of that decline and about its consequences; 
• and assertions that rather than declining social capital is being generated by different sorts of engagement.