More people live alone today than at any point in recorded history, in absolute numbers and proportionately, too. Until the 1950s, it was impossible to find a single human society that sustained large numbers of singletons (my term for people who live alone) for long periods of time. Today, living alone is common wherever there’s a market economy, a welfare state, and women’s rights.

The consequences of this new social condition are profound and far-reaching, affecting our personal lives, our families, our communities, and our cities. Naturally, the rise of going solo has changed our ways of communicating, and communications technologies have transformed the experience of going solo, too.

Living alone has never implied being alone or being isolated, though pundits and professors often conflate them. Since the invention of the radio and the telephone, singletons have had resources for connecting with other people and ideas. Today, with the internet – particularly Skype, Facebook, instant messaging, e-mail, massively multiplayer video games, and the like – being home alone can be an intensely social experience. Paradoxically, being home with others can be an intensely private experience, too.

This is not the way we conventionally understand what happens in the domestic life of media users. Consider, for instance, the work of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, whose classic 2000 book Bowling Alone argued that Americans were hunkering down at home rather than participating in social and civic affairs. Putnam identified several sources for what he characterized as a crisis in American social capital, but he pinned most of the blame on the television, which had become the centerpiece of late-20th-century domestic family life.

Today, however, American families rarely gather together to take in a TV show, and on the few occasions when they do so (say, the Oscars or the Super Bowl or a Harry Potter movie), there’s usually someone straying off into a smaller screen. Instead of crowding onto the sofa, individuals in the contemporary home splinter off to use their own personal media, whether a PC, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. They may not be interacting with the people beside them, but they’re often connecting with someone else.

Of course, virtual interaction is not the same as face-to-face communication, and critics often worry that screen time pulls us away from human contact. But what is still the best study of heavy internet and smartphone users, conducted by Rutgers University Communications scholar Keith Hampton and published by the Pew Research Center in 2009, suggests that these concerns are overblown. Surprisingly, heavy internet users are more likely than others to spend time with others in person, and to visit public places where strangers interact, too.

Singletons may not be disconnected from people, but they are beginning to cut ties to other things, such as telephone landlines and cable cords. Going solo makes it easier to consolidate communications systems into a smartphone, tablet, or laptop, since there’s no need to share a home phone with a partner. It’s also a good economic decision: Nielsen reports that, on average, singletons save more than anyone – about $33 per month – when they rely exclusively on a mobile phone.

Satellite and cable television companies have good reason to fear a similar exodus. Until now, they’ve counted on singletons to be good customers, because on average they spend a little more time watching television than people who live with others. But singles pay the same monthly satellite and cable fee as couples and nuclear families, which means they effectively pay a premium for the services – and stand to save more than anyone if they switch to online entertainment. Now that they have access to Netflix, Hulu, and live streams of many major sporting events, singletons have genuine alternatives. Traditional communications companies will have trouble tying them down.