idw – Informationsdienst Wissenschaft
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
It all begins with an observation. At some point, Dr Denis Newiak, a researcher at the BTU, noticed something that sounds trivial yet is far-reaching: television series strikingly often tell stories about people who are lonely – not on the fringes of the story, but at its very heart.
A physicist who shuts himself away from the world in his nerdy bubble. A teenager who takes her own life, and whose cassettes detailing her story of suffering are subsequently passed from hand to hand. A boy who runs a motel with his mother in the middle of nowhere, where there will soon be no more guests. The Big Bang Theory, 13 Reasons Why, Bates Motel – three series, three genres, three completely different target audiences. And yet, thought the researcher at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg (BTU), the same quiet current ran through them all: loneliness, expressed through images, sounds and stories, because it is so difficult to put into words in real life.
A media scholar’s perspective on the everyday medium
Newiak, who researches and teaches at the chair for Applied Media Studies at BTU, is not one for hasty conclusions. Anyone who follows his work recognises a researcher who prefers to dig deep rather than judge hastily. His two-part doctoral thesis, completed in 2022, entitled “Televisual Forms of Expression of Modern Loneliness. Discourses and Analyses”, completed in 2022, gave rise to two closely interlinked monographs: “The Lonelinesses of Modernity” and “Loneliness in Series”. In the first volume, Newiak sketches a cultural history of isolation, spanning from industrialisation through urbanisation to the digital network society. His thesis in this work is that modernity promises freedom, individuality and progress, but demands a price in return, and this price manifests itself in ever-new and ever-harsher forms of loneliness.
The second part of this research project applies this sociological diagnosis to concrete examples. For Newiak, television is a particularly illuminating medium in this regard. More specifically: the series, a format which, like almost no other, grows alongside its audience over long periods, accompanies characters through many episodes and, in doing so, has the scope to explore something as elusive as loneliness in great depth.
Three series, one toolkit
This media-analytical section of the doctoral thesis was published in 2022 as the book *Einsamkeit in Serie*. It is now being published in the coming weeks as an international edition by the renowned London-based specialist publisher Palgrave Macmillan, part of the Springer Nature publishing group, under the title “Loneliness in Series: Televisual Expressions of Modern Loneliness”.
Newiak’s approach in the book is characterised by the meticulousness of a cartographer. He develops what he himself calls an “iconography of modern loneliness”: an analytical framework that allows images, camera angles, colour schemes, as well as narrative structures and even the sound of a series to be systematically examined in terms of how they make loneliness visible. Chapter by chapter, he works his way through the three series – from the visual aesthetics and major narrative themes right through to the individual lonely characters who carry these stories. He devotes a separate chapter solely to the sound of loneliness: those moments of silence, sound effects and musical gaps through which series make the feeling of being alone audible before a single word is spoken. The result is not merely an analysis of these works, but a toolkit with which other series, other genres and other eras can also be examined for their depictions of loneliness.
Why this research is now having an international impact
The fact that this research is now being published in English by one of the major international academic publishers is more than just a formal footnote. It is the story of a topic that has encountered the right question at the right time. In recent years, loneliness has evolved from a private emotion into a public policy issue. In 2018, the UK appointed, for the first time, a minister with explicit responsibility for the issue and presented a national strategy against loneliness; the World Health Organisation warns of the health consequences of social isolation, and following the years of the pandemic and its social distancing measures, the issue has entered the public consciousness even more strongly in many societies.
Newiak offers neither another guidebook nor statistics, but rather something that is often missing from the public debate: a cultural interpretation. A fundamental premise that runs through much of his work – and applies to series such as *Sløborn* or his exploration of blackout scenarios in film and television is that fiction helps us to understand things that, in real life, are too vast, too vague or too threatening to look at directly. A series can show what statistics merely ask about.
At the end of his book, Newiak ventures an outlook, which he programmatically titles: ‘The Loneliness of Modernity and the Communities of Television’. It is a sentence that encapsulates a central point of this line of research: the very medium that is often regarded as a means of escape from real life can be a space in which societies confront their own isolation – collectively, mediated by the same screen.
About the book: Denis Newiak: Loneliness in Series. Televisual Expressions of Modern Loneliness. Palgrave Macmillan, Wiesbaden 2026, 308 pages. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-658-40791-9
Dr. phil. Maxim Denis Newiak
T +49 (0) 355 69-3242
MaximDenis.Newiak(at)b-tu.de
About the book: Denis Newiak: Loneliness in Series. Televisual Expressions of Modern Loneliness. Palgrave Macmillan, Wiesbaden 2026, 308 pages. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-658-40791-9
https://www.b-tu.de/en/news/article/32166-was-serien-ueber-unsere-einsamkeit-ver...
Merkmale dieser Pressemitteilung:
Journalisten
Gesellschaft, Kulturwissenschaften, Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften, Philosophie / Ethik
überregional
Buntes aus der Wissenschaft, Forschungs- / Wissenstransfer
Englisch
Sie können Suchbegriffe mit und, oder und / oder nicht verknüpfen, z. B. Philo nicht logie.
Verknüpfungen können Sie mit Klammern voneinander trennen, z. B. (Philo nicht logie) oder (Psycho und logie).
Zusammenhängende Worte werden als Wortgruppe gesucht, wenn Sie sie in Anführungsstriche setzen, z. B. „Bundesrepublik Deutschland“.
Die Erweiterte Suche können Sie auch nutzen, ohne Suchbegriffe einzugeben. Sie orientiert sich dann an den Kriterien, die Sie ausgewählt haben (z. B. nach dem Land oder dem Sachgebiet).
Haben Sie in einer Kategorie kein Kriterium ausgewählt, wird die gesamte Kategorie durchsucht (z.B. alle Sachgebiete oder alle Länder).
