From “The Problem with Processed Storytelling,” by Richard Brody, The New Yorker, March 12, 2013:
As we moderns become more isolated—more occupied with our virtual lives, more distracted by a greater flow of information and stimulation—the emotional comfort food that the rules provide and the illusion of human connection by way of stories become all the more alluring. And that’s why, in the age of the Internet, the success of TV series is self-perpetuating: the plethora of online discussion they spark drives viewers further into online isolation and makes them all the hungrier for contact with characters and their stories.
…
When people were crowded with people, and life was teeming with immediate, maybe oppressive, contact, whether in small-town moral surveillance or in urban family tumult, the pictures—not, metaphorically, movies over all, but the images themselves—provided a kind of imaginative escape, blasted open a realm of imagination and fantasy that was, though collective in access, weirdly and fiercely personal in effect. It was the public invention of a new kind of privacy, a new kind of inwardness. Now, the proliferation of stories is the very sign of collective isolation, the obsessive fascination with characters a mark of frustration of contact….
Meanwhile:
The epidemic — and health dangers — of loneliness
Loneliness affects 25% to 60% of older Americans and puts millions of Americans 50 and over at risk of poor health from prolonged loneliness. Loneliness is almost as prevalent as obesity. In a survey of members of the AARP Medicare Supplement Plans, insured by UnitedHealthcare, 27% to 29% were lonely; about 9% were severely lonely. Among those members representing the top 5% with the most chronic conditions, spending 5% of the healthcare dollar, loneliness rises to 55% of that population, half of whom suffer with severe loneliness.