The Four Dimensional Human Ways of Being in the Digital World Synopsis
It is the winner of the Jerwood Prize. A constellation of everyday digital phenomena is rewiring our inner lives. We are increasingly coaxed from the three-dimensional containment of our pre-digital selves into a wonderful and eerie fourth dimension, a world of ceaseless communication, instant information and global connection. Our portals to this new world have been wedged open, and the silhouette of a figure is slowly taking shape. But what does it feel like to be four-dimensional? How do digital technologies influence the rhythms of our thoughts, the style and tilt of our consciousness? What new sensitivities and sensibilities are emerging with our exposure to the delights, sorrows and anxieties of a networked world? And how do we live in public, with these recoded private lives? Tackling ideas of time, space, friendship, commerce, pursuit and escape, and moving from Hamlet to the ghosts of social media, from Seinfeld to the fall of Gaddafi, from Facebook politics to Oedipus, The Four-Dimensional Human is a highly original and pioneering portrait of life in a digital landscape.
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Laurence Scott Press Reviews
'Scott is an ideal person to tackle this subject... Moreover, he is both a creative writer and a perceptive literary critic, who leavens his text with some mercurially brilliant turns of phrase and poetic coinages, while at the same time stiffening it up with huge dollops of literary explication and quotation... with his joyful phrase-making and sharp eye for the follies and absurdities of wired life, Scott would be the perfect investigator to report back on what it feels like to be... uploaded.' -- Will Self Guardian
'A book that delivers a nourishing counterpoint to the ephemerality of the digital age. Scott offers layered and complex thought in a style that is elegant and artful. He has worked long and hard, you imagine, at these thoughts and words - and to prove that it can still be done, despite the glow of distraction emanating from a smartphone inevitably sitting on a table nearby, is worth celebrating in itself.' -- Sophie Elmhirst Financial Times
'A delicate reflective book... Scott's book is a gentle meditation that drifts through observations about behaviour, state of mind and sense of self, without manufactured conclusion. And he defines something that many of us feel, a need to resist the relentlessness of immersive technology, and the constant enthusiasm for technology that runs parallel with our anxiety and claustrophobia.' -- Jemima Kiss Observer
'An entertaining and insightful guide to the positive and negative effects of this new reality.' -- Ian Critchley The Sunday Times
About Laurence Scott
Laurence Scott is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing. His essays and criticism have appeared in the Guardian, the Financial Times and the London Review of Books, among other publications. In 2011 he was named a 'New Generation Thinker' by the Arts and Humanities Council and the BBC. In 2014 he won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction. He lives in London.
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