Modernity presents itself as an age of increasing social disintegration: secularization and rationalization, urbanization and globalization, individualization and digitalization make it difficult for communities today. Modernity comes with desirable promises that make it attractive, but it does not come free: Its price is escalating modern loneliness. Denis Newiak tells a cultural history of modernization that, from industrialization to the late-modern network society, produces ever new and harsher experiences of loneliness. The author Denis Newiak is a media, film and television scholar, teaches media and communication theory at various universities and conducts research on expressions of loneliness in modern societies This book is a translation of an original German edition. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation.