The other day, I was thinking about the time I saved up to buy a webcam so that I could see and hear the strangers I had befriended on LiveJournal. Back in 1999, a world in which you could do that on your phone while surfing the web and texting gifs of your favorite show was not on my radar. But British sci-fi writer JG Ballard saw the current state of things, mainly social media, coming, all the way back in 1977!
Get a load of this excerpt from an essay he wrote for Vogue:
Particularly creepily accurate: "In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day. "
Best profiles = Facebook. Wittiest dialogue = Twitter. Expressions filmed through the kindest filters = Instagram (he was probably thinking of Amaro and Valencia).
