I happened upon this old 1977 video of Marshall McLuhan where he predicts the effects of technology on humanity and I can’t stop thinking about it. I haven’t heard of McLuhan before now, but the way that we have digitized ourselves, creating alternate avatars online and giving up our corpus, resonates in a heavy manner with his thinking.
“You’re just an image on the air. When you don’t have a physical body, you’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. This is one of the biggest effects of the electronic age. It has deprived people of his private identity… One of the big marks of the loss of identity is nostalgia.”
I am susceptible to digging through memories to find meaning, happiness, and comfort. I wonder if my very-online self has increased my reliance on nostalgia to fill in a sort of aspirational identity because I have so few strong connections in real life at the moment.