And Americans aren’t all that lonely, either. Refuting the new Atlantic cover story.

Americans devour books that say we’ve never been lonelier or more disconnected. The Lonely Crowd, The Fall of Public Man, and The Pursuit of Loneliness rank among the best-selling sociology texts in history. In recent years, Bowling Alone and Alone Together won significant attention and generated widespread debate. Often, these books lament the loss of a Golden Age when Americans had better marriages, stronger communities, safer streets, and greater happiness. They warn that we’ve grown dangerously isolated, and after we read them we return to our friends, families, and colleagues to discuss why we no longer spend time together.  

In this month’s Atlantic cover story, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” the novelist Stephen Marche offers an unusually extreme claim about the state of our disunion: “[W]e suffer from unprecedented alienation,” he writes. “We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: The more connected we become, the lonelier we are.”

Articles about American alienation may well feel true to those who long for simpler, happier times, but they’re built on fables and fantasies. In fact, there’s zero evidence that we’re more detached or lonely than ever. But since the Atlantic story is already becoming popular and influential, with columnists and commentators citing it as evidence that the Internet is tearing us apart, it's worth showing how it manufactures the myth that we’re lonelier than we’ve ever been.

The article opens with the tale of Yvette Vickers, an elderly former Playboy playmate and B-movie actress who died alone in Los Angeles and wasn’t discovered until her body had “mummified.” Her death, Marche reports, is the symbol of our atomized age. It's a good story, poetically told, and it's powerful enough to distract us from a fundamental flaw with the essay: It offers nothing to support its thesis that “we have never been lonelier.” The closest it comes is a sentence reporting that an AARP study published in 2010 found a dramatic rise in chronic loneliness among adults older than 45 (but not among the younger cohort most likely to use Facebook), and a vague claim that “various studies have shown loneliness rising drastically over a very short period of recent history.” Sorry, this is nowhere near sufficient to establish Marche’s grand claims.

Marche also draws heavily on the work of John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago psychologist whom he calls “the world’s leading expert on loneliness.” (I agree.) He quotes from Loneliness, where Cacioppo writes that “Forming connections with pets or online friends or even God is a noble attempt by an obligatorily gregarious creature to satisfy a compelling need,” and that “surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing ” But for most of us, Facebook friends are supplements, not surrogates, to our social lives. Neither Cacioppo nor others who do research on loneliness believe that people expect online contacts to “make up completely for the absence of the real thing.”

I reached out to Cacioppo, who told me he does not believe Marche’s “never lonelier” thesis. “I would not say never,” the psychologist emailed me. In fact, Cacioppo continued, “the evidence for it increasing recently is mixed.”

Marche does make some effort to persuade us that Americans have never been more socially isolated, which is a measure of our frayed ties rather than our loneliness. He claims that, “We meet fewer people. We gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less easy.”  But the data he provides to back up this claim come from an infamous study  reporting that, in Marche’s words: “In 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had only one such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to, and 20 percent had only one confidant.”

I say infamous because, as I report in Going Solo, my book about the rise of living alone (which Marche quotes), the study’s findings—and the survey data on which they are based—are so inconsistent with all other research in the field that the leading sociologists of social ties distrust them. (There appear to be problems with the original survey data in the 2004 General Social Survey, and an article (PDF) in the 2009 American Sociological Review cautions that “Scholars and general readers alike should draw no inference from the 2004 GSS as to whether Americans’ social networks changed substantially between 1985 and 2004; they probably did not.”