George Washington University Professor Amitai Etzioni is perhaps the best known academic proponent of this viewpoint. He and other communitarians argue that liberalism has evolved to a point where an excessive focus on individualism itself has come to undermine the community that sustains civil society and nourishes social capital. Democratic communitarianism bases its ideals on the sacredness of the individual, but argues that we become who are through our relationships, which involve important virtues like reciprocity, loyalty, and shared commitment. Communitarianism remains controversial, however, because of the continued ambiguity of the concept, its commitment to an explicit moral language, and the problems of defining such abstract concepts like virtue and justice in a pluralistic, multicultural society with competing conceptions of the true and the good. Robert Putnam, for example, examines the role of television as a suspect in the decline of civic life.
Television also tends to be a solitary, or at least isolating, form of social activity.
Marcella Ridlen Ray, a doctoral student in the Institute of Public Policy at George Mason University, has looked at how technological change has impacted associational life in the United States, including ways that the combined impact of technologies like the telephone, the automobile, television, radio and the Internet have encouraged both individualism and social connectedness. From this perspective, governments, markets, and certain forms of technology like television, have expanded and intruded into spaces formerly occupied by civil society, contributing further to the loss of social capital. The recent change of presidential administration in the United States demonstrates very clearly the powerful impact of ideas on policy problems. Thus, the policies that result from civic renewal will undoubtedly provoke as much debate as the topic of civic renewal itself. Yet, if these debates are civil , if they engage citizens and rouse them from their spectatorship, then we will have made measurable strides toward renewing our civic culture.