Taken a while to read all of this but I've been thinking about this from a different angle - the dematerialised self who becomes so subsumed by their online self that they no longer function in the real world. I have a friend who has become convinced that her tweets are being read by all the 'famous' people that she follows and that they are talking about her, she feels that she is having a significant impact on these people, as if she has a relationship with them which she doesn't but she is projecting her desires on to that space - yes, this is some form of paranoid delusion but its clearly exacerbated but the ability to become something other, something virtual, In many ways she exists more inside the net than she does outside of it. It's been bothering me a lot recently. I don't know if this adds anything - I suppose maybe the internet just gives us a new way to become insane.
Ah this has reminded me of something I was meaning to mention
There is this book by Erik Davis called Techgnosis where he looks into the history of technology and how it's been spiritualized or had religious impulses projected onto it, intertwined with it
So around the same time as the telegraph and Morse Code was developed, the spiritualist movement was also kicking off - and they called their magazine, or one of them anyway, The Spiritual Telegraph.
But another angle on this is how people who are mentally ill are drawn to metaphors based around current technology - whatever has recently been introduced, it becomes part of their delusion
So a schizophrenic in Alexander Graham Bell's era might think that somebody was controlling them through the telephone system
Then, by the mid-20th Century, it's voices speaking to them through the television.
And a little later, it's a satellite that's beaming thought-control into their heads.
And so on...
No doubt there have been delusions based around fax machines, pagers, etc a
I have had a couple of friends who went completely - horribly - crazy. An early sign was the belief that someone (rivals at work usually) was hacking into their email. In the first case - an ex-girlfriend - when she started going on about how university colleagues of hers were doing this, I thought nothing of it - a/ because she always seemed like the most psychologically rock-solid person I knew pretty much, so it never occurred to me she was imagining this, but also b/ I thought 'how typical of academia', it being a rivalrous sort of field - seemed very likely they would be capable of malice and deviousness. (Talking about technology, this is late 90s, pre-broadband, world wide web - she got very enthusiastic about building a giant hypertext project that would connect everything - another characteristic schizo trait, in its manic euphoria stage: projects of system-building)
The next time it happened - a friend who worked at a fashion magazine, convinced her mail was being broken into etc - I knew better.
So your friend with the imaginary relationships via Twitter with the famous is I fear quite ill - but also on the cutting edge of insanity, in a sense.
But then the thought extending from that to the topic of the thread - what is the relationship between dematerialisation tendencies and mental illness?
(Spiritual and religious beliefs that involve body-transcendence are not so far from delusions and psychiatric disorders)
(Before technology as we understand it, schizo disorders would take the form of encounters with demons, sprites, succubi, visitations from angels or God etc)
Clearly Man is a sick animal to start off with, that is basic Freud et al ... already alienated from the body...
Tendencies that tend to further extricate consciousness from its flesh-cage - and forge these mediated distance-abolishing connections with remote networks or entities - would seem likely to foster even worse forms of anguish and psychological malaise.
There is a famous case study of Freud's - the case of Schreber, a judge in Austria who went psychotic, this is late 19th Century - much referenced by your critical theory French types, Deleuze & Guattari etc
I forget the precise nature of the madness (one part of it involved transgendering fantasies of being the wife of the Austrian prime minister or something) or what exactly the latter theorists read into the case, but from Wiki, this bit:
"
The fundamental unit of Schreber's cosmology were "nerves", which composed both the human soul and the nature of God in relation to humanity. Each human soul was composed of nerves which derived from God who with "His" own nerves was the ultimate source of human existence. God's nerves and those of humanity existed parallel to one another except when the "Order of the World" was violated which constituted the fundamental premise of Schreber's memoirs- in which the two universes experienced dangerous "nerve-contact" with each other."
reminded me a little of the McLuhan line about the extensions of man and the nervous system becoming expanded through technological interface
And this bit:
"
The peculiar universe of Schreber's was mediated by the activity of rays, which could assume a "pure" and "impure" relation; these rays could be controlled by Flechsig or emanated strictly from God, who sought to influence Schreber and his reality by "divine miracles"."
is sort of proto-technology, almost anticipating radio
With all these delusions, there is porousness - the borders of the self / body are violated, invasively interfaced with systems beyond it.
Now that sensation is ecstatic, when chosen voluntarily through drugs or other practices... or a certain use of technology
But when it happens without volition, as an out of order distortion of perceptions, it's terrifying.