Television Series Against Late-modern Loneliness: Forms of Telemedial Communitization Using the Example of “13 Reasons Why”

Based on sociological and socio-philosophical theories of modern loneliness, this paper examines the socializing, uniting, and ‘Gemeinschaft’-creating functions of television series as they are negotiated in discourse on television theory and the sociology of media. Using the series 13 Reasons Why as an example, it is shown that contemporary television series contribute to social cohesion and social meaning-making in a variety of ways: behavioral modeling, the visualization of social causation, and the production of temporal structures help late-modern societies coordinate their complex interactions; cult and fantum, formation of notions of truth, and the production of parasocial relationships produce new experiences of closeness, community, and transcendence in an age of increasing social distance. Can television series contribute to better enduring or even overcoming the diverse lonelinesses of late modernity—or do they, by thereby pushing modernization ever further, not only produce even stronger feelings of social isolation?