Making sense of the lonely crowd, today. Youth, emotions and loneliness in a networked society

Abstract

The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (Riesman et al. 1950) was a landmark in the twentieth mid-century social science and cultural criticism (McLaughlin 2001). While it led the yet almost unknown sociologist David Riesman (1909–2002) to the cover of Time magazine in 1954, the book asserted itself as a critical and attentive look at a changing society. Increasingly away from a society based on production and characterized by a “tradition-directed” culture, Riesman’s Lonely Crowd unveiled the individuals’ character composing that new society, fundamentally shaped by the market orientation of a consumer and media culture, and thus “other-directed”. In the period of post-World War II, a context of strong industrialization and automation, Riesman explained how and why the other-directed character was beginning to flourish among middle-class individuals. This chapter attempts to make use of such a broad and inspiring theoretical background to unveil the senses of the lonely crowd, today, specifically as far as the youngest generation is concerned. Particularly looking at iGen, Generation Z or centennials, as often referred to (Twenge 2017), the following discussion takes as its basic assumption the existence of a networked society as a constitutive feature of such a generation, yet only seemingly irrelevant in the everyday experiences of individuals.