This phrase gave rise to the title of Robert Coles’s 1993 book, The Call of Service, a meditation on the meaning of voluntary service — the kind we offer to others and the impact it has on us in the process.

I was quite inspired by the book when it came out. Coles himself seemed to exemplify the spirit of service in his writing, in his teaching and in his own personal life.

After reading The Call of Service, I went on to read several other books by Coles and eventually to write an article about his work. I then posted the piece on my website. This was in the early days of the Internet, before most people had discovered e-mail or started searching the Web.

One day, about a year later, the phone rang. When I answered, the voice at the other end said, “Hello, Scott? This is Robert Coles. I just read an essay you wrote about me. It was a very fine piece of work, and I just wanted to say thank you.” He didn’t use a computer, he told me, but a friend of his had run across my article on the Internet, printed it out and mailed it to him.

We went on to talk for almost an hour. He called me one of the “finest interpreters” of his work, which was quite a compliment given that he has been the subject of countless newspaper and magazine profiles, at least a half-dozen TV documentaries, and several major biographies.

He wasn’t very interested in talking about himself, it turned out. He kept on asking me about my work, my family, how I liked living on the West Coast, and so on. It was a warm and inspiring conversation, one that subsequently blossomed into a friendship.

After our talk I asked myself what it was that prompted Coles to call me that day. I can’t be sure, but I believe it was something deeper than just the impusle to say thanks. It was more likely a desire to give something back. It was a gesture born of gratitude, not obligation or duty. A kind of reaching out. And that, I think, is the essence of true service — a desire to acknowledge another and give thanks in whatever small way we can.

To write a book about service is one thing, I realized, but to exemplify it in our everyday lives is quite another. Coles taught me that in a vivid and direct way.

I was reminded of this episode because my essay on Robert Coles — the one that prompted him to call me that day — has just been reprinted as part of a special tribute to Robert Coles in the new issue of Parents League Review. The man and his work are still timely, perhaps more so than when I first discovered him almost twenty years ago. My piece is called A Way of Seeing: The Work of Robert Coles.

In his essay “The Strange Disappearance of Civic America,” Putnam drew a direct parallel between the arrival of television and the decline of what he called “social capital” — the social networks, trust, and norms of reciprocity that are the essence of healthy communities. As he pointed out, a “massive change in the way Americans spend their days and nights occurred precisely during the years of generational civic disengagement.” It follows that technologies like computers and television which “cocoon” us from our neighbors and communities exacerbate the loss of social capital.

But with the rise of so-called “virtual communities” on the Internet, there are some who believe that electronic technologies can actually be used to strengthen the bonds of community and reverse America’s declining social capital. They stress that electronic networks can help citizens build organizations, provide local information, and develop bonds of civic life and conviviality. While the claims are no doubt overstated in many cases (as they always are when new technologies are involved), there is growing evidence that this may be the case, particularly in local community networks.

I explore this idea in “Civic Networks: Building Community on the Net,” an essay published in the new book Composing Knowledge, edited by Rolf Norgaard (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press). The piece looks at the role of online networks in building and strengthening community and tries to sort through some of the rhetoric — much of it overblown — about so-called virtual communities. My sense is that these networks can play a role in strengthening communities if they are used to augment social networks that are already in place. In addition to their obvious benefits as text-based information systems, networks can serve as public spaces for informal citizen-to-citizen interaction, they can support rational dialogue and, in some cases, deliberation, and they can promote the social connectedness, trust, and cooperation that constitute social capital.

• Read the essay
• More about the book Composing Knowledge