On Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man

The single most important piece of writing I read in 2006; Sennett's 1976 study of the public and private sphere through the ages (in particular through the last four centuries) is erudite, expansive, thought-provoking and profound. Defining the city as "the place where strangers meet", Sennett goes on to demonstrate the breakdown of the public sphere by the emergence of personality, the cult of the individual and the erosion of the boundary separating public from private. Sennett is a sociologist with the ability to study the bigger picture without getting lost in a statistical labyrinth. Here he takes a selection of detailed observations scattered through the centuries, probing deeply into the social relations of one particular era or location at a time (he dubs the technique "postholing"), and brings them into a wider ideological frame. It makes for highly interesting reading.

Sennett believes the public sphere has been in deep crisis for quite some time, that the public and private need be clearly distinguished for healthy social relations to exist, that personality is a narcissistic construct that threatens public discourse, that public space in our cities should be rich with interaction as it once was, that we endlessly seek the intimate in public interactions. The book includes an analysis on the social relations that brought about cosmopolitanism, the rise of the bourgeoisie, clothing and its evolving role in identity, myriad observations on the impact of urban planning on social interactions and a lot more.

I'm curious to know how Sennett views the hyperlinked 'social network' environment of the present day. He's talking in kensington next week at an RCA debate, so perhaps i'll have a chance to ask him myself at some point.

Anyway, essential reading for anyone with a commitment to social software (beyond the 2.0 hype machine).