ABSTRACT
Late modernity is transforming the way loneliness is experienced. It creates new problems that serve to separate people from each other, but also creates new opportunities and new spaces to form new connections. This chapter analyses three key sites in late modernity – love and intimacy; social media; and human-animal closeness – as both sources and spaces of resistances to loneliness. First, we analyse how wider social changes in intimacy are creating more ambivalent love bonds but also offer possibilities for a greater number of open and closer pure relationships. Second, we ask how social is social media?, suggesting that new forms of digital media may disconnect us from others as much as they connect us. We argue, however, that claims about social media use and loneliness need to be nuanced to different social-technical contexts, usage patterns and platform affordances. Third, we consider growing human-animal closeness as both evidence of weakening social bonds and also a space in which humans can ameliorate the effects of loneliness through close and embodied attention. Each site is considered in context of recognising that quantity of contact does not equate to good emotional connection with others, and that loneliness is an increasingly complex emotion with social-structural dynamics being reshaped by wider processes of individualisation, consumerism, mediatisation and increasing reflexivity.
