Yet estranged individuals can find that the primary advantage of social networking sites is that they offer a less intimidating route to reconciliation.
As Orlando Patterson, of Harvard, a scholar of black marriage patterns, recently observed, African-Americans remain "among the most unpartnered and estranged individuals in the world".
The recognition that avaricious, hour-munching capitalism has estranged individuals while now offering them minus compensation can only turn us back towards our families - though it remains to be seen whether that make us more insular, or affords us the time to talk to the teenagers on our street corner.
On the other, attempts to render subjective experience academically legitimate by presenting it as a social product further estrange the individual from his experience, by translating it into third-person terms he or she may not endorse or recognise: individual experiences of beauty can suddenly become embodiments of class prejudice.
Previous efforts to consolidate, increase efficiencies and reduce redundancies, left the individual offices feeling estranged in terms of their IT needs.
Perhaps this asocial view stems from the alienated nature of most societies which makes individual activity appear to be estranged from social relations.
Estranged by the essential loneliness and privacy of suffering, individual family members wanted to talk with the nurse alone, turning down suggestions about having a family meeting.
Kevin Rudd, Labor's last prime minister, once declared himself "basically a conservative when it comes to questions of financial management" and as both an individual and an influence, he could not be further estranged from the modern Labor tribe.
In mass society, individuals are at once subsumed in the social totality and estranged from one another.
A defence lawyer told the court that Murphy was estranged from his wife, had "only one friend in life", and was now an "ostracised individual" because of his offending.
When the relationships are taken in the aggregate, the sad individual twists of fate that endeared the impostors to their lovers become cynical commonplaces: deceased parents, estranged siblings, urgent errands, rushed goodbyes, dozens of fictitious children and exes and old friends killed off or dispatched to the far corners of the Commonwealth.
