[MarkusWandel]

If you're socially misfit, it really helps to have a peer group. Speaking of myself, the high school geek is perfectly comfortable in an engineering company, for example. Doesn't provide all one's social needs, but at least a sense of having peers, of belonging somewhere.

But aside from that, 30 years ago, say, for a misfit it was either "make an effort" or "stay lonely and bored and single". With so much online interaction these days, I think all but the naturally social (not the majority of the population!) have less incentive to even bother.

And now the office social life is being replaced, to some extent, by working at home. So yes, technology has everything to do with this.