People with Asperger Syndrome and high function autism generally suffers from impaired social skills and a strong need for a private space for oneself. In diagnostic classifications of mental illnesses social awkwardness and a strong desire for solitude are viewed as symptoms of mental disorder and as deviances from an imagined normality.

Based on interviews with autistic people and analysis of social interaction between them on a social media platform the aim of this paper is to investigate how new social media transform their situation in various ways. New social media, with its culture of connectivity, reshape how they relate to others and themselves and transform vulnerabilities that are always at play in encounters between human beings. At play are also changing borders between the public and the private as well as the questioning of communicative ideals based on face-to-face encounters.

More specifically we focus on how new social media transforms: 1) vulnerabilities between people in social interaction as well as the “interaction order” that regulates this interaction; 2) what it means to be a social being – and consequently to be involuntary lonely or seeking solitude.