Gordon Silverstein

For Eric Eldred, plenty. In 1995, Eldred, a New Hampshire native, had tried to engage his daughter’s interest in literature by exploiting the Internet. He digitized such classic books as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, making them text-searchable, and then went a step further, embedding the hypertext with links to maps, pictures, references, and other […]

For years, academics have tried to understand how America turned from a nation of joiners, doers, and citizens into a nation of passive contributors whose interaction with public affairs is largely limited to responding to direct mail and cheering (or howling) at cable-TV programs. And Robert Putnam’s influential 2000 book Bowling Alone has largely framed […]