Recent quotes:

Today, this formative act of consumption no longer requires we physically possess an object. Music, along with photos, videos, even our written words are “largely invisible and immaterial until we choose to call them forth,” Belk, now a professor of marketing at York University, writes in an update to his ideas on the extended self in Extended Self in a Digital World, published this May. Our digital age has ushered in five changes to the extended self, most interesting among them “dematerialization.” “Things are disappearing right before our eyes,” Belk writes. Our music “has come to reside somewhere inside our digital storage devices or on servers whose location we will never know.” In other words, digital natives are growing up in a world where many of their possessions aren’t actually physically possessed.