[tinderliker]

I think loneliness gets worse when we see "perfect friendships" on TV that last for years, like in Harry Potter or Scrubs. It makes us feel that we are missing something very important to human feelings - complete or near complete trust on another human being.

[trukterious]

Movies and TV shows are naturally biased towards social relationships and friendships because it's hard to present a first person point of view. Yet I assume that's where the future of entertainment lies, in first person virtual reality. Peep Show with David Mitchell and Robert Webb is the only exception I can recall but the humour there is fairly dark and nihilistic so it's hardly an endorsement for solitude (besides, they're flatmates). A counterexample from literature I can recall is Robinson Crusoe, who is alone on the island for the first time in his life but not lonely because of a new-found relationship with God.

[agumonkey]

Reminds me how people felt in the 70s with the wave of ideal tv shows where everything was clean, neat and nice. A lot of people liked shows such as Married with children because it was a show depicting flawed characters and families.

[Pamar]

This I agree with, but it was not in the book (I might add a bit about it in my own comments). Thanks for suggesting this: the author says that lonely people have unrealistic expectations about human relationships but he does not mention that movies, tv, novels and comics could have intensified this a lot. So we could probably blame literature/entertainment more than "Social Media"