How much have you examined this topic of interest bxmuscle? I'm very intrigued.
Well, I too started noticing how more people I meet out and about were really avoiding dealing with, meeting up for conversations, having old-fashioned dates, or even talking on the phone. Instead they wanted to text, email, web-cam or do anything except real-time and real-world exchanges. Except when they wanted to hook up for sex. Then 2 yrs ago I met a 20-something guy who asked for my number at a club, called me, accepted my suggestion that we meet up for drinks, then told me when we meet up how he was totally shocked that I asked him out; he thought I was just gonna suggest that he come by for sex; as if suggesting two people meet, talk and get to know each other was shocking! That's when I knew something had shifted in the culture.
Meanwhile, although I'm too young to have been part of the New Left, I was aware of what I believe to be it's powerful critique of what it called the alienating effects of affluent capitalism, how and why it fosters a systematic breakdown of human connectedness, dating back in the 1960s. I went to grad school specifically to study it though eventually shift into French history. Key to this perspective is the uses of technology -- not technology itself, which can be used for good or ill, but its organization and uses within systems designed to maximize profit controlled by huge and powerful trans-national economic organizations. That old New Left critique is the source of the idea of life a "spectacle" generated by technology and passively consumed by consumers vs. a lived reality.
Fast-forward to the digital age, and this process in its infancy in the 60s is fully developed now.