What is the cost of publicity for the human person? This question takes on special urgency in societies where a public life is offered to anyone with an internet connection, yet loneliness has been called an epidemic. Amy Hungerford draws together the history of fame; fresh insights from sociology, and psychology, and cognitive science; and case studies from public lives enabled by older forms of media to reveal fundamental features of our contemporary predicament. She argues that understanding the social aspects of solitude – what she calls “networked solitude” – both sharpens our accounting of publicity’s costs and offers a way to live under conditions of modern exposure.
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