The Connection Gap: Why Americans Feel so Alone
By Laura Pappano
Rutgers University Press, 2001
Shopping online. Chatting on the cell phone. Computer games. Instant travel to wherever you want to go. Yet all these conveniences and entertainment come at a high price. By surrounding ourselves with gadgets and material comfort, we are cutting ourselves off from what matters most: our fellow human beings.
The Connection Gap explores the new loneliness of people who are over-committing and under-connecting. Laura Pappano takes a passionate look at the pressures and desires of modern culture by drawing on personal experience, academic studies, and perceptive observations of our culture as reflected in advertising, literature, and popular magazines.
Commentary
“In one of the most thoughtful of the recent spate of books on the disheartening relationship between technology, consumerism and community..., Boston Globe journalist Pappano examines our market-driven desire to have it all faster, bigger and better.... What separates this book from the pack is Pappano's careful examination of our changing feelings about technology and emotional connection. Pointing to 1950s magazines, she reveals that TV was first marketed as something that would draw families together and stimulate conversation, and that long-distance calls were touted as being 'almost like a visit.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Pappano's method of close observation... takes into account the nickels and dimes of social capital, putting an individual, contextualized face on what can sometimes seem like an abstract phenomenon.”
— The American Prospect
“An important human message for the 21st Century, compellingly presented.”
— Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape