About this Research Topic

Background

In this Research Topic, we explore the intersection of loneliness, technology, and human (dis)connectedness by examining the tools through which loneliness is addressed and ‘solved’. Even prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, loneliness had emerged as a significant challenge to health and wellbeing in contemporary society, prompting technologists and industry designers to produce ‘loneliness technologies’ – such as video chat solutions, social robots, smart speakers, and social media platforms – in attempts to tackle the problem. These technologies all aim to foster a sense of social connectedness, by producing a form of virtual presence. Simultaneously, however, these technologies are also cast in the role as causes of loneliness and disconnectedness – because they afford only secondary or ‘artificial’ togetherness and thus suppress ‘real’ togetherness. To capitalize on these tensions, this Research Topic contends that loneliness technologies can serve as a lens for understanding the complicated relationships between loneliness, technology, and human (dis)connectedness.

The Research Topic of Virtual Presence brings together novel empirical and theoretical work on loneliness technologies to consider the complicated relationships between loneliness, technology, and human (dis)connectedness. Against the background of different welfare systems and institutions all concerned with the health implications of loneliness, we will examine loneliness technologies in development and use and as they are represented in policy documents. We will offer insights into how different actors engage with these technologies as well as opportunities for shaping and enhancing future technology design and use. As loneliness technologies all purport to proffer the user with a sense of presence, we will also explore how presence is desired, conceived and done through these technologies. Drawing on diverse disciplinary traditions, the authors will reconstruct various categories of presence through the lens of telepresence technologies and thus seek to re-formulate the hierarchies of physical and virtual presence. Ultimately, then, the goal of this topic is to develop new insights and intellectual tools that will allow us to contribute to, and critically appraise, the development of new possibilities for future forms of connectedness.

We are interested in empirical and theoretical papers that address questions of loneliness technologies-in-use, related discourses of technology, health, wellbeing, life stage and age (e.g. old age and youth), and the nature of presence and human connectedness. We are also interested in papers that consider how inequalities of access to technology shape social relations, and how the political economy of loneliness technologies shapes our understanding of these relations.

Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

• How policymakers articulate the relationship between loneliness, technology, and (dis)connectedness
• How technologists work to promote loneliness technologies in a culture in which technology is considered both a cause of, and solution to, loneliness
• How loneliness technologies are perceived, used, and negotiated by various user groups
• How the relationship between health, wellbeing, loneliness, technology, and (dis)connectedness can be reconceptualized, in light of new and technologically mediated ways of being co-present.

Keywords: Loneliness, technology, qualitative research, policy, ageing, education, dialectics

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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