American novel is Melvilles Moby-Dick, the tale of a man on a quest so lonely that it is incomprehensible to those around him. American culture, high and low, is about self-expression and personal authenticity. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called individualism the great watchword of American life.Self-invention is only half of the American story, however. The drive for isolation has always been in tension with the impulse to cluster in communities that cling and suffocate. The Pilgrims, while fomenting spiritual rebellion, also enforced ferocious cohesion. The Salem witch trials, in hindsight, read like attempts to impose solidarityas do the McCarthy hearings. The history of the United States is like the famous parable of the porcupines in the cold, from Schopenhauers Studies in Pessimismthe ones who huddle together for warmth and shuffle away in pain, always separating and congregating.We are now in the middle of a long period of shuffling away. In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam attributed the dramatic post-war decline of social capitalthe strength and value of interpersonal networksto numerous interconnected trends in American life: suburban sprawl, televisions dominance over culture, the self-absorption of the Baby Boomers, the disintegration of the traditional family. The trends he observed continued through the prosperity of the aughts, and have only become more pronounced with time: the rate of union membership declined in 2011, again; screen time rose; the Masons and the Elks continued their slide into irrelevance. We are lonely because we want to be lonely. We have made ourselves lonely.The question of the future is this: Is Facebook part of the separating or part of the congregating; is it a huddling-together for warmth or a shuffling-away in pain?Well before Facebook, digital technology was enabling our tendency for isolation, to an unprecedented degree. Back in the 1990s, scholars started calling the contradiction between an increased opportunity to connect and a lack of human contact the Internet paradox. A prominent 1998 article on the phenomenon by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon showed that increased Internet usage was already coinciding with increased loneliness. Critics of the study pointed out that the two groups that participated in the studyhigh-school journalism students who were heading to university and socially active members of community-development boardswere statistically likely to become lonelier over time. Which brings us to a more fundamental question: Does the Internet make people lonely, or are lonely people more attracted to the Internet?The question has intensified in the Facebook era. A recent study out of Australia (where close to half the population is active on Facebook), titled Who Uses Facebook?, found a complex and sometimes confounding relationship between loneliness and social networking. Facebook users had slightly lower levels of social lonelinessthe sense of not feeling bonded with friendsbut significantly higher levels of family lonelinessthe sense of not feeling bonded with family. It may be that Facebook encourages more contact with people outside of our household, at the expense of our family relationshipsor it may be that people who have unhappy family relationships in the first place seek companionship through other means, including Facebook. The