A: An article I wrote for The Boston Globe Magazine on The Connection Gap, my first attempt to articulate this new loneliness I was feeling, received a huge response. In phone calls and letters people told me I was describing something they felt, but didn’t have a way to discuss. I hope the book is a vehicle for a discussion about connection and the choices we are making, both personally and collectively.

Q: Who is your intended audience?

A: The Connection Gap was written for a broad, general audience. As a journalist, I think it’s my job to promote public discussion and so in writing this book, I aimed to make it readable, provocative, and accessible — kind of like a good dinner-party guest.

Q: What is "The Connection Gap"?

A: The Connection Gap is my catchy way of describing the cumulative choices we have (often unconsciously) made and this moment we have arrived in, a time in which it is becoming ever more difficult to forge connections — with ourselves, with others, and with the physical world we inhabit.

Q: Are people really lonelier today than in the past? Why? How does this loneliness manifest itself? What are the consequences? What can we do to prevent it?

A: In many ways that matter, I believe we are lonelier. We have more choices that allow us not to interact or relate to others (especially those different from us). These choices are considered advances in technology or are viewed as desirable benefits of an affluent society. We are also more time-conscious, more rushed, more tuned to serving our individualized, custom needs. It feels less natural to stop and help someone else or even to pause for conversation.

The social norms, values, and time pressures of daily life are making it tougher to do the things people used to do to feel connected. We don’t sit with extended family around the living room. We don’t have time to sit on the front porch, to mow our own lawns, to teach our children how to sew or how to change the oil in the car. More and more we hire people to do the kind of junky things that actually build relationships. It is not the great family vacation that comes to mind when we think of family — it is the quotidian, the nothing moments when you are all hanging out drying dishes or folding laundry that builds connection.

The consequences of this new loneliness are a less cohesive community, more disparate families — cousins who never see cousins — and people who feel out of touch with their own lives. How to prevent it? Well, it’s here and it’s happening. What we can do is make choices that force us to connect with others. We need to have more conversations, to sometimes unplug our computers and turn off our cell phones, to do things for ourselves and for other people. We need to know people who are different from us and not buy so heavily into consumer culture, which tells us that we "deserve" luxuries and personal attention.

Q: Many of the primary causes of loneliness that you list involve fairly costly items, such as cell phones, computers, large homes, etc. Is this new loneliness a middle-class/upper class phenomenon?

A: The costly items — cell phones, computers, large homes — are not alone causes of loneliness. They are, rather, tools that make it easier for us to control our interactions and gain privacy. With an increasing ability to control our interactions and our physical space it creates a figurative and sometimes literal fortress that makes it tough for others to break in and connect. Do rich people have more access to these things? Absolutely. But the issue is not only the actual possession of these things, it is the desire for them by people of all classes — and what that desire represents. The desire creates striving for things whose by-product is disconnection. There are, for example, lots of good reasons to have a cell phone. But if you are talking on the cell phone while you are driving with, say, kids in the car or a friend, you are not having conversations with those people, or you are not gazing out the window and thinking. The problem is that we don’t see the trade-offs we make when we dial and put the cell phone up to our ear.

Q: You write, "Over the past century, we have moved from being a society utterly suspicious of spending and consumerism to one defined by them." Why do you feel this is so and what does it have to do with disconnection?

A: When I look at what people have written about spending money over the last 100 years, I see a transition from an era in which spending was done carefully and even reluctantly to one in which we almost look for excuses to spend money. In the process, we have come more and more to define ourselves, our lives, and our values in consumerist terms. We don’t any longer merely buy something. We consume it and it consumes us. We want products and services that say the right things about and to us. It is a passionate, lust-filled relationship and we so eagerly submit. In the end such "relationships" — and some researchers do describe emotional relationships with products — take our time, energy, and emotions. Consumerist values muddy up legitimate human connection. Relationships become about what you own or can buy and not who you are. Consumer language also colors the way we conduct relationships, sometimes worrying too much about the "value" of a favor or the balance sheet of who owes what to whom.

Q: You cite the Internet as technology that leads to greater loneliness. Why do you feel this is so?

A: The Internet is a fabulous tool. It is as indispensable to modern life as the telephone or the television. And yet, it commands a different interface. When we use it to communicate with others, we become subject to its limitations and our interactions must be tailored to conform to its requirements. As long as we understand that we’re doing this, we’re all right. But quickly, the tool becomes invisible and we imagine ourselves just doing the thing unaware of how we are changing our interactions to suit the limitations of technology. That is where we get into trouble: Changing our relationships to fit the Internet age, not appreciating — and eventually not noticing — the way a person sits in a chair or bites their lip as they answer a question. Research also shows increasing Internet use connected to higher rates of social isolation and loneliness. As real as feels, it is not the same as being physically present.

Q: You write about how people have become so dependent on e-mail as a mode of communication that they will substitute Internet chats for real, in-person meetings. But can’t the Internet actually connect you to more people than ever before?

A: The Internet can connect us to more people than ever before. But multiplying the numbers of interactions we have does not mean we are connecting more. Not all interaction is created equal. As intimate as on-line relationships can feel, they are simply not the same as face-to-face meetings. Electronic communiqués are useful — no essential — but they lack the essential element of physical presence. Anyone in business or the working world knows the power of the in-person meeting and how that physical sizing up and connecting can immediately legitimize a "shadow" electronic relationship. The Internet threatens to spread us far and wide — but too thin. The challenge is to use it appropriately. The problem is, it is so fast and easy and we are so pressed for time, that we slip into using it even at times when we shouldn’t. Electronic interactions are so appealing because they give us control, control over how and when we respond to another person. I worry that we are already controlling too much about how we relate.

Q: What do our homes and neighborhoods tell us about ourselves? How does their design increase or decrease the Connection Gap?

A: What strikes me is that the average new home is more than 40 percent larger than it was 25 years ago — even though our families have grown smaller. We have fewer people living in more space. And homes today have more bathrooms and are zoned for privacy. The design of the family home has gone from prizing efficiency by placing bedrooms close together around a bathroom, to prizing privacy through design that puts bedrooms far away from each other and with more bathrooms. The design of our homes — and these are average American homes, not upscale megahomes — reflects a desire for space and privacy. We want to regulate our interactions with people under the same roof. It seems perfectly reasonable. And yet, it is the sharing of space (including the bathroom) that allows us to know one other. We are designing out those tedious, but immensely valuable, interactions.

Q: You quote statistics from the General Social Survey (an annual sampling of Americans) that show the majority of us are spending far less social time with our parents that in the past. Why do you think this is so?

A: We are not just spending less social time with our parents, but also less social time with our siblings, our neighbors, and our friends, according to data from the General Social Survey and other studies. Some of this is the result of demographics: We are more geographically spread out today and it takes a greater effort to get together. But significant numbers of family members that live within an hour’s travel time see each other rarely. And that suggests a changed perspective: the extended family is no longer the organizing structure of life. If people once made a habit of visiting on Sundays — and many people I interviewed spoke longingly of this routine — it is now an outdated social practice. Spending time with family members requires setting aside needs and desires to accommodate others. Today we are less good at doing that. But this is not just about being pressed for time and derelict in our obligations. The dearth of in-person visiting also reflects a thinning of our familial relationships.

Q: Technology, such as the fax machine, e-mail, and overnight delivery services, has really speeded up deadlines in the workplace. Do you feel this "need for speed" has flowed into our non-working lives and if so, has it made us more lonely?

A: We crave speed and the efficiency we imagine comes with it, not only at work, but in every breathing moment of our day. The acknowledgement of this craving is all around us — from the rise of the EZ Pass transponder for short-cutting time waiting at the toll booth to the proliferation of quick-prepare meals. We are so eager to speed up nearly every chore or event in our day that we pack our schedules so tight that one commitment truncates the next. Increasingly in business and life, people double-book and multi-task. My husband recently returned from his annual medical association meeting complaining of days when he had three breakfast appointments. What does this have to do with loneliness? Lots. The culture of speed and efficiency we embrace cuts short time for human interaction, which is slow, cumbersome, winding, and very inefficient. The love affair with speed and efficiency is also shifting our perspective, crafting us into people with shorter attention spans who are impatient and oriented to machine time instead of human time.