Ways of Being in the Digital World

The Four-Dimensional Human

A revelatory exploration of life in the digital age

In this sequence of almost Montaigne-like essays, blending observation, philosophical inquiry and a highly literary sort of layering, Scott exquisitely articulates not what the digital world can do but how it feels to engage with it. He resists the usual polarisation of debate, capturing instead our “breathless” mix of excitement and unease. Scott’s writing is exceptionally fine, and his cultural range extravagant. Describing YouTube’s “enveloping of the past”, he moves from Ian McEwan to Katie Price. Pondering the phenomenon of digital detox, he recalls EM?Forster’s yearning for the greenwood. He flits from Google’s Desert View to early Christian hermits, from Airbnb to late-Victorian science fiction — and it is always insightful, never pretentious. An astounding debut.

Scott's references are admirably broad, spanning high and low culture in a layered and complex (and Samuel Johnson shortlisted) account.

Clever, allusive, with a capacious sense of humour, the book sizzles with intelligence ... brilliant.

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.

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.

A real flirt of a book. It’s full of impish gaiety, elegant and lithe in its language, providing intellectual ambushes and startling connections. It examines our evolving notions of publicity, privacy, time-wasting, frivolity, friendship, allegiances, denial, escapism and squalor in the internet age. The teasing, wary optimism is bewitching as well as informative.

[Laurence Scott's] account of what is becoming of us is often beautiful even if unnerving at times... It is certainly worth our attention.

A probing and elegant meditation on the digital world’s 'ways of being'... The book is full of artfully concentrated imaginative descriptions... less a commentary on the digital world than a meditation on the many ways our technologies serve as spectral emanations of our inner lives in all their contradictory richness. Beyond the lovely precision of its diction and companionable voice, it is notable for its courage to write from inside the ambiguities and confusions of online life, to resist the easy pleasures of summary judgement.

This is a brisk, important, funny and thoroughly absorbing work …The allure, edges and routine of the online sphere are explored here with considerable literary flourish.  Scott’s sentences fizz with ingenuity and clarity and he observes familiar territory with fresh eyes…This is a serious book that asks serious questions about what our new ways of living is doing to our minds, relationships and the natural world.  But this is nevertheless delivered with a jocular and self-skewering touch.

With a vast range of reference, from Greek myth to Zadie Smith, this is a wonderful debut, precisely observed and crafted with a dazzling intelligence that makes you want to quote whole pages aloud.

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.

An entertaining and insightful guide to the positive and negative effects of this new reality.

Here at last we have a portrait in full of our digitally extended, digitally entwined selves. With wit, intelligence, and tenderness, Laurence Scott explores the glowing, sprite-filled wonderland that we now inhabit, and the silent, empty places that lie in its shadow.

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows and The Glass Cage

Exotically beautiful and conceptually generous, this study of digital life is essential reading even (and especially) for those of us without a Facebook account. Scott is a delightfully tender and humane guide to transformations that might amaze Ovid and new forms of nostalgia to rival Proust. Scott's thinking is strenuous, his prose raucously alive. He writes about change but this is a landmark book and long may it last.

Alexandra Harris, author of Romantic Moderns and Weatherland

He ranges from big themes to the smallest of anxieties - 'the silence of the unsent text message', for example - with a relentlessness that reminds one sometimes of Geoff Dyer... and at other times of Walter Benjamin.

I enjoyed Scott’s tropes, whether he was nailing the defining quality of Katie Price as “eternal next-ness”, or describing the x-ray view of screened luggage as a Warholian “pastel fantasia”.

Laurence Scott is a gifted anthropologist of cyberspace whose fieldwork is kindled by sharp insights and luminous prose.

Chloe Aridjis, author of Book of Clouds and Asunder

The Four-Dimensional Human is a highly original, thought-provoking and ambitious look at life in the digital age. It sparkles with original insight and commentary about how we are all, for better or worse, adapting to the dramatic changes in the world around us.

The Four-Dimensional Human adds immeasurably to the burgeoning literature on what sociel media do to our innermost lives, relationships and stance towards the world... a richly complex potrayal of the ways we live today in the digital world, inviting readers to understand our own often inexplicable, bittersweet sensations. As a writer, [Scott] is naturally alert to the way the digital world affects language... his witty takedown of the "noun invasion"... is worth the price of admission alone. The future, Scott warns, "will demand an evolution in how we think about what it means to be present, how we manifest bodily and virtually in the world". His book provides the best of companions and guides along the way.

A bemused bulletin from the bleeding edge of the digital revolution. Like the online world itself, it's scattershot yet coherent, varied yet concentrated, restless and inspiring – and you can lose a lot of hours perusing it.

Laurence Scott’s meditation on the way digital media have changed not only our lives but our consciousness is full of fresh ideas and written with great panache. Drawing on a wide range of references – from Henry James to Eminem, from nineteenth-century futurist fiction to the fable of Beauty and the Beast – Scott illuminates our bewildering new world.’

Jane Ridley, Andrew O'Hagan and Lucy Hughes-Hallett, judges of the 2014 Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction

Scott’s thought-provoking insight invites us to question what lies in store for the so called four dimensional human … This book is ideal for people who are fascinated with debates around technologies impact on us.

A thought-provoking and powerful read that’s intelligent but easy to engage with.

I enjoyed Scott’s tropes, whether he was nailing the defining quality of Katie Price as 'eternal next-ness', or describing the x-ray view of screened luggage as a Warholian 'pastel fantasia'.

Laurence Scott's book The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World (2015) was shortlisted for The Samuel Johnson Prize, won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize, and was named the Sunday Times ‘Thought Book of the Year’. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Guardian, Financial Times, New Statesman, Boston Globe, Wired and the London Review of Books. In 2011 he was named a ‘New Generation Thinker’ by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC, and now regularly writes and presents documentaries for BBC radio, as well as presenting and contributing to the Radio 3 arts and ideas programme, Free Thinking. He is a Lecturer in Writing at New York University in London, where he lives.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2015 
WINNER OF THE JERWOOD PRIZE 
ONE OF WIRED's NON-FICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE 
 
We spend more time than ever online, and the digital revolution is rewiring our sense of what it means to be human. Smartphones let us live in one another's pockets, while websites advertise our spare rooms all across the world. Never before have we been so connected. Increasingly we are coaxed from the three-dimensional world around us and into the wonders of a fourth dimension, a world of digitised experiences in which we can project our idealised selves. 
 
But what does it feel like to live in constant connectivity? What new pleases and anxieties are emerging with our exposure to this networked world? How is the relationship to our bodies changing as we head deeper into digital life? Most importantly, how do we exist in public with these recoded inner lives, and how do we preserve our old ideas of isolation, disappearance and privacy on a Google-mapped planet?

Laurence Scott

A stylish, playful exploration of what digital life is doing to the way we find meaning in the world... It is a philosophical meditation of perceptions of reality, achieved by means of beguilingly playful moves from confession to anthropology to social analysis. Scott operates on a dauntingly large conceptual scale, but there's a sense of embrace in his cleverness. It's not often that a highly ambitious work of social analysis speaks so determinedly to the heart.

Laurence Scott’s book on the signs and symbols of the digital age is insightful, in part for its academic nuance but also for its humane, personal style. In trying to make sense of the digital world, Scott takes on everything from the Internet of Things to the changing nature of truth. A moving meditation of reality in the 21st century.

Reality and belief in the digital age, and signs above all, are the themes of this sophisticated book.... A report from the front line of the digital generation by someone superbly well-equipped to read and decode the signals. Scott is very, very good at metaphors. He also has a formidable wide range of cultural references.

Laurence Scott … writes beautifully about the experience of reality in the digital age, and about how grief changes our perceptions … I’m besotted with Scott’s writing.

Clever, funny and deeply moving... an engaging and thought-provoking journey through the fakery of modern life. Digital panic isn't new, but Scott writes such entrancing prose that reading his book is like waking up from a nightmare and realising, in a panicky split-second, that you're not sure if something bad has actually happened in your real life or just in the parallel one that gets live-streamed inside your own head.

[Scott’s] project – to carve out a more reflective space, a “poeticised reality”, in this four-dimensional world – feels admirable and necessary. In an era of anti-nuance, such meticulousness is a tonic.

My favourite book title of the year so far and what lies behind it is delightful, intriguing and sticky; his thoughts on storytelling and our collective realities, play in your mind long after the book is closed.  The turn of phrase, the softness but effectiveness of the emotional punch and depth of understanding and subtlety of the dissection of our changing culture of storytelling means my copy is thick with underlined phrases and sentences. Once finished, I began again ...  I was perpetually fascinated.

Illuminating... Perceptive... There is throughout the book a sincere wish to make beautiful sentences and surprising images out of quotidian experience.

The roots of today's rampant unreason are buried deep in the cultural and psychological bedrock of our societies; simplistic explanations don't reveal the seismic faults being opened up by technology. In its willingness to dig deeper, Picnic Comma Lightning provides a bravura investigation of our turbulent times.

A brave exploration of life after loss and how it alters our reality. Full of insightful, often quite sweeping, formulations. Courageous.

Scott is funny, Scott is personal. An engaging, imaginative, sometimes moving read.

In Search of a New Reality

**A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK** 
 
'Laurence Scott … writes beautifully about the experience of reality in the digital age, and about how grief changes our perceptions … I’m besotted with Scott’s writing.' Derren Brown, i paper 
 
 'Clever, funny and deeply moving... an engaging and thought-provoking journey through the fakery of modern life.' Mail on Sunday 
 
'A stylish, playful exploration of what digital life is doing to the way we find meaning in the world.' Guardian, 'Book of the Week' 
 ________________________ 
 In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, the narrator offers a memorably brief account of his mother’s death: 'picnic, lightning'. Picnic Comma Lightning similarly opens with the death of Laurence Scott's parents, and the definitive ending of their deaths raises for him one fundamental question: how much of what we live through is truly real? 
 
 With humour and insight, Scott transforms this personal meditation on loss into an exploration of what it means to exist in the world now. It used to be that our vision of the world was rooted to reasonably solid things: to people, places and memories. But today, in an age of constant internet debates, online personas and alternative truths, reality feels more vulnerable than ever before. 
 
 Picnic Comma Lightning looks at how digital life is distorting, echoing and magnifying our age-old preoccupation with what is real and what isn't. Where do we draw the line? How is technology shifting these boundaries? And how do we maintain a sense of reality in an increasingly unreal world? 
 ________________________ 
'A report from the front line of the digital generation by someone superbly well-equipped to read and decode the signals.' Sunday Times

Laurence Scott

Praise for Picnic Comma Lightning

A stylish, playful exploration of what digital life is doing to the way we find meaning in the world... It is a philosophical meditation of perceptions of reality, achieved by means of beguilingly playful moves from ...

Laurence Scott’s book on the signs and symbols of the digital age is insightful, in part for its academic nuance but also for its humane, personal style. In trying to make sense of the digital world, Scott takes on ...

Reality and belief in the digital age, and signs above all, are the themes of this sophisticated book.... A report from the front line of the digital generation by someone superbly well-equipped to read and decode t ...

A stylish, playful exploration of what digital life is doing to the way we find meaning in the world... It is a philosophical meditation of perceptions of reality, achieved by means of beguilingly playful moves from ...

Laurence Scott’s book on the signs and symbols of the digital age is insightful, in part for its academic nuance but also for its humane, personal style. In trying to make sense of the digital world, Scott takes on ...

Reality and belief in the digital age, and signs above all, are the themes of this sophisticated book.... A report from the front line of the digital generation by someone superbly well-equipped to read and decode t ...

A stylish, playful exploration of what digital life is doing to the way we find meaning in the world... It is a philosophical meditation of perceptions of reality, achieved by means of beguilingly playful moves from ...

Laurence Scott’s book on the signs and symbols of the digital age is insightful, in part for its academic nuance but also for its humane, personal style. In trying to make sense of the digital world, Scott takes on ...

Reality and belief in the digital age, and signs above all, are the themes of this sophisticated book.... A report from the front line of the digital generation by someone superbly well-equipped to read and decode t ...

Books by Laurence Scott

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