Disconnected Hearts: Technology and Intimacy

The paper asks how the conditions of work and the ways people connect through technology interact. Its argument brings economic precarity, digital mediation, intimacy and demographic questions into the same frame, rather than treating technology as a complete explanation for social change.

This is a conceptual argument. The public synopsis does not establish that digital technology causes social isolation or declining birth rates.

• Work: how might automation and economic insecurity affect the conditions in which people form relationships?
• Connection: what changes when intimacy and identity are increasingly mediated through digital interaction?
• Institutions: what would help people sustain human connection as those conditions change?

Treat these as questions to investigate, not demonstrated causal links. A useful next step is to ask which observations would distinguish economic pressures from changes in communication, and whether different groups or settings would support different explanations.

The original working-paper record is linked below. No dataset or independent scholarly review is supplied with this synopsis, so it cannot tell you the size or direction of a technology effect on demographic outcomes.