You are a four-dimensional human.
Each of us exists in three-dimensional physical space. But, as a constellation of everyday digital phenomena rewires our lives, we are increasingly coaxed from the containment of our predigital 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?
Laurence Scott―hailed as a "New Generation Thinker" by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC―shows how this four-dimensional life is dramatically changing us by redefining our social lives and extending the limits of our presence in the world. Blending tech philosophy with insights on everything from Seinfeld to the fall of Gaddafi, Scott stands with a rising generation of social critics hoping to understand our new reality. His virtuosic debut is a revelatory and original exploration of life in the digital age.
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“Adds immeasurably to the burgeoning literature on what social media does to our innermost lives, relationships, and stance towards the world. [Scott] doesn’t travel on main roads—the familiar worries about technology—but rather on hidden byways marked by imagination and metaphor, where data cannot follow.”
— Times Literary Supplement (London)
“Here at last is a portrait in full of our digitally extended, digitally entwined selves.”
— Nicholas Carr, Pulitzer Prize finalist“Beyond the lovely precision of its diction and companionable voice, [The Four Dimensional Human] is notable for its courage to write from inside the ambiguities and confusions of online life, to resist the easy pleasures of summary judgement.”
— New Statesman“Scott, an essayist and critic, offers a rich phenomenology of living in the digital age and its radical reshaping of fundamental human experiences…Scott’s sharp eye for irony and great wit make this debut a lively contribution to the conversation about the effects of the Internet on society.”
— Publishers Weekly“Clever, allusive, with a capacious sense of humor, the book sizzles with intelligence. Scott mixes observations of deep profundity and eloquence with some head-scratching notions about digital life.”
— New York Times Book ReviewBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Laurence Scott’s essays and criticism have appeared in the Guardian, the Financial Times, and the London Review of Books, among other publications. A lecturer in English and creative writing, he lives in London.
Matthew Brenher, originally from London, is an award-winning actor of stage, film, and television and an accomplished voice-over artist.