This thread got me thinking about McLuhan's reading of Burroughs and the stuff about the 'electric age' being the process of man externalising himself in the form of machines and gadgets, you can see it in the way people rely on Google rather than remembering or learning things themselves. It's like outsourcing cognitive functions.
"Today men’s nerves surround us; they have gone outside as electrical environment. The human nervous system itself can be reprogrammed biologically as readily as any radio network can alter its fare....
"Such is the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global membrane of enclosure."
i'm glad McLuhan's been brought up
Because one thing I was thinking reading some of the earlier comments was that people have been reckoning with this becoming-dematerialised syndrome for a while
Certain bits of language would have me flashing a little on Baudrillard, or this feller who wrote books after book of post-Baudrillard / post-Virilio delirium, Arthur Kroker (a lot of it very dated, very 1990s, now I'm sure, but the book he wrote largely inspired by sampling, Spasm, is full of great passages)
And then before all that lot, yes, there's McLuhan
And I actually mentioned the Spectacle myself so there's the spectre of Debord and the Situationists. Debord being indebted both to McLuhan and - i strongly suspect - to a fantastic book published in 1961 I think, Daniel Boorstin's The Image, about the creeping malaise of unreality taking over American society and culture. Written 58 years ago!
Which is not to say that there aren't things about this specific moment worth trying to capture - the contours of what's unfolding, becoming clearer as the residual drops away and the emergent takes sharper shape.
There are things that are possible now, and that indeed are routine now - and the distortions of subjectivity resulting from that - that they could never have imagined. What can be done with a phone and the daily effects of it on life and mentality and the emotions. I don't know if anyone of them could have anticipated something like YouTube and the Broadcast Yourself concept - micro-fame, performance of self. Or social media. Or a dozen other examples.
But I do think these precursors were grasping some of the emerging general principles of what happens to the self, or the social, in conditions of telecommunicational overload, instantaneous access, remote connection / disconnection from the local etc etc etc
The abstraction of Baudrillard's writing, his bloody irritating refusal to put in much in the way of concrete examples or proofs (same goes with many of that lot - Foucault, Virilio, etc), actually makes it more open-ended and capacious - less tied to his present.