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