Hello, I'm Gemma Hughes and I'm associate professor at the University of Leicester School of Business in the UK.
And this is a talk called What kind of a Problem is Loneliness?
Studying technology to understand policy concerns.
And it's a talk I gave to the M.S. and Translational Health Sciences students in October 2023.
So why have I chosen to talk about this particular topic?
Well, the first reason is that it draws on a really interesting research study.
Hopefully you will agree that the study is interesting.
Secondly, it's really relevant to translational health sciences students because it involves looking at innovations which,
although they have been carefully designed, they face some challenges of translation in terms of uptake, adoption and spread.
It also provides the study also provides some examples of different kinds of qualitative research methods,
and it provides an example of how a particular methodological approach can shed new light on a subject,
not just by providing new answers, but by offering different ways of framing new questions.
So what the talk will cover. First of all, I'm going to introduce you to the research study that this talk is based upon the virtual presence study,
and then going to talk a little bit about loneliness, social isolation, health and technology and the connections between those things.
And then I'm going to spend some time talking about the methodology that was used in the virtual present study,
the what's the problem represented by the PR approach.
I'm then going to say a little bit about the empirical data that we found,
and I'm going to give you a relatively brief overview of findings before we stop for questions and discussion.
So first of all, let's introduce you to the research project called Virtual Presence.
Virtual Presence was funded by the Research Council of Norway from 2020 up until 2023,
and it's a cultural analysis of the emergence of telepresence technologies as a solution to loneliness.
It's led by Mark Holder, who is professor of sociology at Oslo Metropolitan University in Norway,
in collaboration with Trish Green Hoge here in Oxford and Ivor and Gilbertson, who is professor.
So at either end, Engebretsen, who is professor of Interdisciplinary Health Sciences at the University of Oslo in Norway.
So the study aims to understand more about what loneliness is as a social and cultural phenomena.
To add to what we know about loneliness as a health problem.
And it set out to do this by looking at one kind of the proposed solutions to loneliness of telepresence technologies.
So this idea of learning more about a problem by examining the solutions indicates a certain methodological approach.
But let's start by taking a minute or two to think about this problem of loneliness.
What is loneliness and why is it a problem that might concern those of us interested in health?
What is loneliness? Can you measure loneliness?
What does loneliness feel like? How can you tell if somebody is lonely?
They may look very lonely like this isolated figure pictured against a bleak mountain landscape.
Or they may be sitting like this person in a cafe surrounded by people.
But they may still feel lonely. It's possible to be lonely when you're with people.
When you're in a crowd. If loneliness is painful or upsetting, can you actually be happy alone?
There's an image here of a woman who's looks like she's camping or hiking in a landscape or on her own completely alone.
But she looks very, very happy and contented. So just these very simple questions already indicate that loneliness is quite complex phenomena.
And there are multiple ways of thinking about and understanding loneliness.
Let me ask you some more questions. When did people first feel lonely?
So we can think about the history of emotions. There's a historian, Faye Alberti, who dates loneliness to around the year 1800.
In her book, The Biography of Loneliness, she tells us that the language of loneliness didn't really exist until around 1800.
In Western culture and history, she links the birth of loneliness to the birth of modernity and a more individualistic society.
She describes loneliness as an emotion cluster and a form of social practice.
But can loneliness also be a positive experience? Solitude and loneliness are sometimes linked.
We might think about the romantic poet Wordsworth, wandering, lonely as a cloud.
Being alone. Being in solitude can allow a romantic connection with the natural world, for example.
Contemporary understandings and research on loneliness frequently refer back to the work of Robert Weiss, who is an American sociologist.
His study, completed in the 1970s, identified a distinction between emotional isolation, which involved lacking a particular relationship,
such as might follow divorce or bereavement and social isolation,
which might be the kind of isolation or loneliness experienced, for example, when moving to a new city for a new job.
So these these two different definitions of isolation, emotional and social give us different facets of loneliness,
although there are, of course, potentially connections between them.
More recently, seminal work on biological and evolutionary constructs of humans as essentially social beings,
is argued by Cacioppo and colleagues that loneliness has a function like thirst or hunger.
When we are thirsty, we know we need to find a drink when we are hungry.
We know we need to eat. When we are lonely, we seek out company because of the evolutionary advantages of being in groups.
And these ideas help explain why loneliness is bad for us, not just in how it makes us feel, but in other health outcomes.
So theories of loneliness range from socially constituted patterns of isolation really
related to social identity and situation through to biological and evolutionary theories.
The importance of the relationship between cognitive factors and social situations in producing loneliness has emerged from psychological studies.
So we can see just from the very simple questions that I asked initially and from
this very brief explanation of different ways of thinking about loneliness,
is that there are multiple ways of understanding this phenomena. Loneliness can be understood as something internal, subjective, cognitive,
and as something related to the external social world shaped by networks, identity and social structures.
A common distinction is now made between loneliness on one hand,
which is generally perceived to be a painful, subjective experience, such as can be felt,
for example, even in the middle of a crowd and social isolation, which is generally understood as an objectively measurable, limited social network.
So measuring loneliness can therefore be done by asking people about how they're feeling the subjective experiences.
And we can measure social isolation by quantifying social contacts or activities.
So let's move on to think about loneliness and health. Why is loneliness a problem for health?
Well, loneliness is now known as a global public health issue,
which has been exacerbated by measures of lockdown and social distancing during the pandemic, but was already understood as being a policy problem.
For example, in the UK, the UK government made significant steps to address loneliness as a national policy problem.
Back in 2018, when they appointed the first so-called Minister for loneliness.
They added loneliness as an important priority to a ministerial portfolio, and they launched a document,
a policy called a Connected Society, a Strategy for Tackling Loneliness, laying the foundations for change.
The strategy highlighted the adverse health consequences of loneliness, which were linked to early deaths on a par with smoking and obesity,
and they were associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, depression, cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease.
So loneliness is well known as a health issue. Let's move on now to think about the connections between loneliness and technology.
Now, the relationship between technology and loneliness is frequently represented as a dualism.
That is, it has both positive and negative characteristics.
There are two sides to this relationship with technology understood as having the power to both cause and cure loneliness and social isolation.
So technology is understood as being able to take us away from people.
There's an image here of a man sat amidst a whole crowd of people.
Yet he's not engaging with them. He's staring down at the glowing screen of his phone.
But technology can also connect us at a distance. We can be in touch with.
We can see. We can hear. We can be in communication with people that we love.
That people we miss when they're far away from us. There's some interesting work by a team headed up by Nowland,
who published an article about the relationship between social internet use and loneliness.
They their work is psychologically informed. And they captured that this dualism in their representation of the relationship between,
in their case, social internet use and loneliness as bidirectional and dynamic.
So when used for social connections, the internet can enhance relationships.
But what is used to withdraw from social internet interaction, It can exacerbate loneliness.
Let's just pause and clarify this word technology as well, because I've used it a lot already without defining it.
Technology covers a whole range of things. It includes devices, it includes connectivity, if you like, the networks or assemblages that people use.
It includes technology that mediates connections that might be connecting with a person in particular,
such as when you have a zoom call or interacting with people more widely, for example, via social media.
It might also include technology that doesn't connect people to each other.
But instead of this connection in and of itself providing company.
So one example is robot pets that are used perhaps infrequently, but they are certainly in circulation.
Another example is Paro. The robot seal.
Paro is a robot which looks like a cuddly, white, fluffy seal but is used in dementia care.
It can offer companionship and Paro learns to respond to certain words and gestures.
So it creates some companionship and interaction with an individual.
But interestingly, it's used particularly in dementia care, to facilitate interaction between the people around the robot.
So it's not just a relationship or companionship that's provided between the robot and the individual,
but it stimulates connections with people that are in the vicinity.
People look at Paro, they they offer to touch it, to pick it up, to pass it around.
It stimulates conversation. So it's a mediating technology as well.
So we've talked about loneliness, we've talked about health and we've talked about loneliness, We've talked about technology.
Let's just put these together and think about loneliness, health and technology.
Despite the ambivalence that's apparent about loneliness in technology and the pros and cons,
technology of all sorts of kinds has been and is being used to address loneliness
with a view to addressing the health concerns associated with loneliness.
Now, the research that's been done in this field is quite mixed.
The evidence, quite the evidence is quite mixed.
The research includes studies undertaken during the pandemic as well as research that was done previously.
Much of the research findings are much of the ways in which the research is presented are broadly optimistic.
Although some of the evidence is quite mixed as to whether or not technology can really address
loneliness and indeed therefore address the health outcomes associated with loneliness.
I mentioned earlier some of the different ways of thinking about loneliness, the diverse theoretical underpinnings of how loneliness is understood.
Now, regardless of how you understand loneliness, presence is a potential solution.
TelePresence is potentially made possible by technology,
so telepresence or virtual presence involves human connection at a distance, usually via video and audio technology.
Virtual presence differs from what is known as co presence or physical presence, which is often synonymous with real or spatial presence.
That's when we are with someone in physical proximity, sharing time and space, as opposed to virtual presence where we're separated by distance.
Now, if I was interested in finding out if technology worked to solve loneliness and improve health,
I'd be doing the kind of research that measured loneliness and evaluated the effect of using technologies on those measures.
But this research study, virtual presence, is concerned not just with do technology's work to address loneliness,
although, of course that's a really important question. But what do those technologies mean and how is loneliness understood?
In other words, we're interested in the dialectics of loneliness and technology.
By studying the technologies designed to address loneliness,
we sought to understand more about the contemporary meanings of loneliness in the UK and reciprocally,
how technologies were shaped by understandings of loneliness.
So this methodology owes a lot to Carol Becky's approach of what's the problem represented to be.
Carol Becky is a political scientist and she approaches policy as discourse.
She rejects the idea that problems such as loneliness are simply naturally occurring and need to be solved,
but instead understands those problems is constituted in certain ways in the discourse.
This isn't to suggest that loneliness and other problems are not real,
but rather that the ways in which those problems are framed and described deserves to be analysed,
not least because the framing of a problem generates certain solutions and negates others.
So what's the problem represented today? Represented to be started by examining,
examining a policy solution in order to better understand the nature of the problem that that solution is intended to address.
So Bucky's approach is summarised in a series of questions.
The first question is what's the problem represented?
Be it a specific policy or policies? The next question one should go on to ask with this approach is what deep seated presumptions,
presuppositions or assumptions or conceptual logics underlie this representation of the problem?
The next question is How is this representation of the problem come about?
And then we need to ask what is left unproblematic in this problem?
Representation? Where are the silences? Can the problem be conceptualised differently?
Next, we need to ask what effects are produced by this representation of the problem?
And finally, how and where has this representation of the problem been produced, disseminated and defended?
How has it been? Or how can it be disrupted or replaced? A simple example that Becky gives in illustrating her approach is to talk about policies that
promote training for women as a means to increase their numbers in positions of influence.
So offering training for women, for example,
to achieve board membership implicitly represents the problem of the lack of women on boards to be women's lack of training to study this policy.
Therefore, there is a need to interrogate critically how women's lack of training is problematise the premises.
This representation of the so-called problem rests upon and its effects.
As a result of this approach, the focus for policy analysis shifts from interrogating taken for granted,
shifts to interrogating taken for granted concepts and categories.
We start to ask how a problem comes about and how it becomes known as the problem.
So if we apply this methodological approach to our concern with technology and loneliness,
that leads us to ask if the solution is telepresence technologies, what is the problem?
That's the methodological approach that underpins the virtual presence study.
But how can we study this kind of thing empirically?
What I'm going to do next in this talk is to explain the approach we took to our empirical data.
So what we did was we looked at two different telepresence technologies that were created by Norwegian Start-Up Company called No Isolation.
One technology is called Av1, and it's a distance learning avatar.
The creation of this device was inspired by the experiences of a young person with cancer who could not attend school,
was living with childhood cancer was an extremely difficult experience.
One of the difficulties that was perhaps a little bit of surprise or unexpected expected to the family of this young person was
that they really missed going to school and they felt that this was something that could be addressed through this technology.
So Av1 was designed. It's a small robot like device that physically represents the young person or child in that classroom.
It looks a bit like a sort of head and shoulders and the young person.
So it sits in the classroom, perhaps on the young person's desk.
The young person, the child is at home or in hospital perhaps, and they connect to the robot via an app on their own smartphone or tablet.
So the robot has got audio visual, so the young person or child can see and hear the activities of the classroom and
they can interact with their classmates and their teacher through the avatar.
The student at home isn't visible from the classroom.
That's deliberate, deliberate design of this technology because many people in perhaps in hospital or undergoing lots of treatment may not.
Their appearance may change and they may not want to be visible. So it actually offers them a way of not having to make themselves visible.
But they can interact through the robot, can move and turn in different directions.
They can speak with a robot. There's a whisper function so they can talk quietly to their classmates of the teacher, to her.
And there's a kind of it's not a hands up where there's a light up function to indicate they want some attention.
And there are a couple of facial expressions that can be created using different lights.
So that's our first telepresence technology, allowing the young person or child who's unable to go to school to have a telepresence in that classroom.
The second technology we looked at is called COPE.
It's a one button large screen computer designed for older people who are not comfortable with or able to use devices such as touch screens.
Comp resembles a kind of a large TV connects from the other person's homes that sits in the other person's home, and it connects to family members,
younger family members who are perhaps at a distance via those family members, smartphones or tablets they connect via an app.
Now, comp has been deliberately designed to have very limited functions,
so it's easy for people to use so it can receive but not transmit video calls, photos and text messages.
Although originally designed for individual family use, some individual family use,
a provision has also been created by no isolation for use by institutions,
nursing home providers and so on to connect with large groups of people at the same time.
So both these devices are described as telepresence technologies.
They both, in different ways offer presence at a distance to combat loneliness and isolation and no isolation.
The company,
the Start-Up Company that designed and developed these technologies has a social mission to bring people together through warm technology.
That's their strapline on their website. And they've identified that social isolation and loneliness strikes certain groups in society hardest.
Those over the age of 80. Hence the design and development of camp and children and young people with long term illness.
Hence the design and development of HIV one. So we've got these two devices.
They're both designed deliberately to address social isolation and loneliness.
And we were interested in looking not just at representations of loneliness in policies, as Carol Becky's approach might guide us to do.
But the practices that people engaged in as they sought to address loneliness and to adopt these telepresence solutions.
So our team has got a track record of looking at the adoption of different technologies in health and social care.
And we took a socio technical approach, that is, we investigated the interactions between people and technologies.
We were concerned with how technologies were used,
how people interpret them and how they used shaped and changed the activities of the people who use them.
So we extended Bucky's approach to considering not only how the problem of loneliness and the solution of technology were represented in policy,
but how it was represented in practices of adoption of those technologies.
So our methodological approach was to unpack the cultural dialectic between loneliness and technology,
and in particular to ask the research questions. How are loneliness technologies perceived,
used and negotiated in a culture in which technology is considered both a cause of and a solution to loneliness?
We also asked, How is the relationship between loneliness and technology been articulated by policymakers,
the media and users of telepresence technologies during and since the COVID 19 pandemic?
So I'm now going to go on and just say a little bit about our empirical study and our
empirical data as a way of showing how this methodology can be put into practice.
So we studied the adoption of these two technologies. Komp and AVI one between 2020 and 2022.
We also studied the broader social and policy context for the adoption of these
technologies in the UK by tracing efforts to address loneliness by politicians,
policymakers, campaigners and service providers.
And we studied immediate representations of loneliness and technology.
So the data that we collected, we created a large dataset.
We looking to look at the adoption of telepresence technologies.
We interviewed people concerned with adopting or taking up, spreading or putting into place Av1 and COB.
Most of those people for Av1 were working in education and they were working in mainstream schools, including primary school and secondary schools.
We also spoke to specialist education providers, including what is to hospitals,
school, a special education adviser and somebody involved in alternative provision.
We also spoke to charities, a number of charities sponsored a V ones for children, young people with particular conditions.
And we spoke to people in local authorities and councils involved in commissioning and evaluating Av1.
When it came to comp,
most of our interviewees were working within local authorities or councils somewhere in the NHS and some others were in charities.
We also observed the discussions about the potential to implement and adopt these technologies
between the technology developer and potential purchasers or commissioners of the technology.
We also did a lot of document analysis,
some of the documents produced by the adopters to support the implementation and evaluation of the technologies,
but also some of the factsheets and briefings created by the technology providers.
Well,
we didn't do was talk directly to the end users of the technologies we didn't interview older people using com or children and young people using av1.
The reason we didn't do that was we already have quite a lot of data from another part of the study from those end users,
and that's already very rich and provides a lot of useful information and data around the experience of using the technologies.
Our focus in this part of the study was on the sense people made of the technologies as
they sought to make it available to people who needed it rather than the end users.
So the second group of data was around policies and actions to address loneliness.
And here we interviewed people working at a more strategic level to address loneliness.
So we spoke to charities, to businesses, to politicians, to campaigners,
to think tanks and to some independent consultants who were working on these issues of loneliness and technology.
We also attended various events. There's a loneliness week in the UK and we attended a number of events.
We also listened to a range of different media around loneliness, including podcasts,
short films, short books, as well as reading lots of policy documents.
And when it came to looking at the political debates,
we looked at all of the House of Commons debates and House of Lords debates about loneliness that took place during the period of our study.
We found eight debates in the House of Commons and one in the House of Lords, and we pulled out the Hansard transcripts and analysed those.
The final bit of our data was around media representations of technology and loneliness.
And what we did was we sampled media stories about technology and loneliness before and after the COVID 19 pandemic,
and we collected 141 newspaper articles from within the UK.
That's our dataset there. So it's a large dataset and a mixed dataset, and we spent quite a lot of time analysing that, as you can imagine.
We did thematic analysis initially of each of those different sections,
and then we pulled that together by using the what's the problem represent to be approach.
So I've taken quite a while to talk about our methodology and methods as something
that I think will be interesting to the MSCI Translational Health Science students.
And I'm just going to move on briefly to talk about our findings as well.
So our findings were in summary, we found that there is this a huge emphasis on connection and participation,
and there are different dimensions on how telepresence was understood to work to address loneliness.
The importance of fostering individual connections was found throughout our data and underpinned much of the work that our participants engaged in.
Whether that was around developing and adopting technologies or around promoting loneliness, policies and campaigns.
The technologies we studied were designed specifically to make connections between people
unable to be together in person due to distance caused by the social isolation of old age.
Those people that using comp or that imposed by a long term illness, those people using av1.
And then, of course, the pandemic caused new concerns about a wider range of people likely to suffer from loneliness and social
isolation in lockdown and caused great efforts to provide people with a range of technological devices,
skills and support to facilitate connections, including funds made available by the government.
And for example, comp, although designed to address loneliness through personal connections,
was also put to use in connecting people with health and other services made inaccessible by pandemic restrictions.
So we found that in addition to the importance of individual connections, telepresence,
telepresence technologies also facilitated social collective connections,
allowing people to participate in a range of activities at a distance, including school work and leisure activities.
TelePresence became widely used to enable people to share in social events at a distance.
Participating in social events using telepresence technologies shifted the focus from individual connections to connections between groups,
including families and classes. So one participant reported the benefits of comp for one older person unable to visit their
younger family members in terms of allowing them to be and I quote ten part of the family again,
because they're in their house and they're seeing the kids paint or cook or, you know, sing songs to them.
It's been part of that again.
That was a quote from an interview with a charity officer about the benefits that they had reported to them of the use of comp.
So connections between social groups,
but also implicated in the use of av1 because the technology provided a telepresence connection between student and class,
but also mediated a social relationship between family in school.
Families, of course, were involved in supporting the technology required for the telepresence connection and through social agreements
about the use of av1 in allowing any fears of unwarranted surveillance or recording of classroom activities,
which was a common concern with with with the use of AP one.
The connection that Av1 offered was therefore collective,
although it was conceived as a device to help a child or young person to maintain
social contact during long term absence from school during due to health concerns,
Av1 was understood by those involved in adopting it as a way for young people to participate in social life beyond the home and family,
including engaging in formal education,
but also in participating in the life stages of childhood and adolescence and the associated transitions and comparison comp,
although it offered some connection between groups, was less able to facilitate or replace in-person groups, for example, during the pandemic.
Instead, platforms such as Zoom were more commonly used for what might be described as scalable sociability,
like initially designed as a kind of 1 to 1 connection or a one to a group connection.
So with this relationship between technology and loneliness frequently represented as a dualism providing both human connection and disconnection,
a further dualism seemed to emerge from our data.
If the solution of technology for loneliness in relation to youth and old age technology was more frequently regarded as troublesome or troublesome,
more risky for younger people than older people in relation to a range of social problems such as bullying,
in addition to and in relate and interrelated with loneliness.
So concerns about younger people using technology for kind of odd reasons was much more apparent.
Whereas or exposing young technology, exposing younger people to inauthentic or damaging, for example, online relationships,
whereas old people were seen to were expected to use technology for good reasons, enabling them to be more connected.
Technology in all shapes and forms, including the telephone,
was much more frequently represented in Our data is necessary for older people to address
loneliness and led to support for older people in accessing and using technology.
Whereas for younger people it was, it was more often represented as problematic.
So the design and use of the telepresence technologies, which were the focus of our study,
indicated that this dualism could be mapped onto the different dimensions of the problem of loneliness, connection and participation.
Comp provided individual connections indicating that the problem of loneliness for older people interpreted through the design of com,
was more akin to emotional isolation assumptions about ageing as being perhaps leaving people
in a more static place and one that includes experiences of loss of emotional relationships.
For example. Three Bereavement are in contrast with assumptions that younger people require
participation in social life to undergo the dynamic processes of childhood development.
Av1 was designed to enable participation, thus addressing social isolation.
This very design and use of telepresence technologies indicates the duality of how understandings of loneliness shape technology,
design and use for different ages and how such technologies shape understandings of loneliness.
Some other important findings from our research was the link between loneliness and other
social and indeed health problems encapsulated in the phrase Loneliness doesn't come alone.
What does that mean? Well, loneliness and social isolation were not the only concerns of the participants
in this study and whether or not the only problems represented in our data.
We found that representations of loneliness in policy and campaigns were associated with other health and social problems,
and attempts to address loneliness and social isolation through technology were inextricably linked with the situations in which people were
experiencing loneliness and other associated problems and were affected by challenges related to the deployment or adoption of technologies.
So for example, using comp with an older person, they may well have multiple health problems to address as well as that loneliness.
Av1 might well be used with a child with a health problem who is missing school but may also have a difficult family situation and
those dynamics needed to be addressed and managed and what were relevant to the use or indeed non-use of the different technologies.
Now, one of the interesting reports that we found when we looked at documents was a report that came out from from about loneliness in London.
And this was work commissioned by the deputy mayor of London.
And they looked to reconceptualize severe loneliness as something that wasn't just likely to affect anybody.
Some of the policies and media representations of loneliness were very much trying to
address the stigma that loneliness has by talking about how anyone could could get lonely.
But actually that the work that was commissioned by the deputy mayor of London looked at how some
people were more likely to experience loneliness in others and to have greater adverse effects.
So it wasn't just that loneliness is something that can be distributed evenly across the life stages or randomly occur to people,
but there was something that was unequally distributed.
This research, based in London, associated severe loneliness with acute poverty, with being single or living alone,
with being deaf and disabled, with going through life changes or being new to London and feeling different or experiencing prejudice.
So we can see that if we reconceptualize loneliness as something that isn't just randomly happening to people,
but perhaps intersects with other kinds of difficulties and disadvantages.
Loneliness itself, as well as the solutions to loneliness, need to be taken, need to take account of the context into which they're being introduced.
We also found across our data representations of the benefits of technology that enabled connection
and participation were interwoven with acknowledgements of the limitations of technology.
So these might be technical glitches where you can't connect, you can't get a signal you've run out of data.
But there are also represent more structural concerns about access to technology.
So, hey, we might be thinking a bit more broadly about company V1,
which are deliberately designed to be easy to use and not rely on, for example, having Wi-Fi or broadband,
but actually thinking about other forms of technology use and technological solutions to loneliness and thinking
about digital exclusion intersecting with some of those other problems associated with severe loneliness,
for example, those identified in the London report.
So there's the limitations of technology itself that come perhaps with all technological solutions.
But then there's also particular limitations associated with telepresence connections.
Representations of telepresence connections in general were compared unfavourably at times with in-person connections and was sometimes,
although perhaps valued as temporary substitutes for pathways to real connections.
TelePresence was frequently compared with in-person or face to face presence,
and the full range of human connections, including touch, were noticeable by their loss.
So there were limitations to technology.
We think back to Karabakh is what's the problem represent to be approach and think about what was silent in our data and in the policy discourse.
There was a relative silence in the discourse about loneliness as something to be endured.
There were few representations of loneliness as perhaps some kind of existential component of human existence,
something that might be endured or that might perhaps allow creativity or connection with nature.
If we think back to the idea of loneliness and solitude as having but perhaps some positive aspects.
Instead, loneliness in policy terms is represented as a social problem, to be solved, to be ended, not something that should be endured.
The consequences of this representation of loneliness include the growth of campaigns and interventions to solve the problem,
including technological interventions. And indeed,
subsequent opportunities arise from this focus for growth and profit organisations
involved in providing solutions and indeed researching solutions to loneliness.
So campaigning work to change policy and raise awareness within a range of organisations has
emerged from the representations of loneliness as a problem that can be alleviated by technology.
And because of the complexity of the adoption of innovations,
which involves an interplay between organisational contacts and policy contacts on the technologies,
we've seen a certain amount of work undertaken to influence and change that broader context.
So analysis of the relationships between loneliness and technology in our data have
allowed us to trace representations of certain concerns and aspirations about society,
the potential harm of technology as a cause of loneliness, the connections made by policymakers and campaigners with other social problems,
and the way in which loneliness was understood more widely as a social problem
indicates different assumptions about what makes for good collective social life.
How people responded to the problem of loneliness indicated, to some extent their ideas.
What makes for a successful society and indeed their assumptions about the resources and connections that are possible.
Providing technology to increase social connections indicates a belief that there are beneficial relationships
ready to be made and assumptions that technology will be readily adopted and allow people to be connected.
So to wrap up, we've analysed how the problem of loneliness is represented through policy and practice of using telepresence technologies,
and I've provided you with some detail of the methodology we've used and the methods we've used in the virtual present study.
To address this. I've given you some highlights of our findings around how telepresence can enable connection and participation,
but also note that new forms of connection can lead to new forms of disconnection.
CO presence seems to remain a priority, particularly post-COVID.
Being with someone physically still remains a priority and still has a great importance,
despite the advantages of being able to connect at a distance.
Technology is never problem free.
Loneliness is no longer a subjective experience to be injured, but has developed into a social health and policy problem to be resolved.
So the relationship between loneliness and technology that we frequently understand is a
dualism offering both connection and disconnection can also be understood as a duality,
with the use of technology informed by and informing how the problem of loneliness is understood.
So I conclude by saying that our analysis shows how loneliness is no longer regarded as simply a subjective,
painful experience, integral to human nature, but is a social, societal and policy problem that demands resolution.
And in this sense, loneliness is perhaps rewritten as social isolation in the social and political handling of the problem.
Thank you very much for listening.