It's not just phones because the trends observed by Putnam preceded all of that. The changes that occured between the 1970s and before and the 1980s and after

It's not just phones because the trends observed by Putnam preceded all of that. The changes that occured between the 1970s and before and the 1980s and after add up to be major watershed in American and more broadly western culture. You can blame neoliberalism but I think the real change is deeper than that. It's the shift from modernity to post-modernity. And post-modernity is an apt term because the name itself is backward looking and doesn't stand *for* anything, only *against* something. The optimism of modernity, the belief in the perfectability of society, the abolition of want, of unlimited horizons - all these whiggish things - butt up against some very hard limits. These limits had been in the zeitgeist since the second world war, but reached the mass market in the 1980s. The US is the quintessential modern country, in the sense of the word I am describing, a child of the Enlightenment. It only follows that the end of modernity would be hard on the American psyche, harder than in older countries with pre-modern cultural DNA.