Digitally existential reading: "The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World" by Laurence Scott

This is really a most startling book. Starting with the late-Victorian notion of a "fourth dimension" - encompassing such phenomena as spiritualism and, famously, HG Wells' time traveller - Scott looks at how digital technology, and in particular an always-on internet, are transforming the experience of being human. Scott himself is a thoroughly wired human being, albeit not quite a digital native, having come of age, as he puts it, just as the internet emerged in the mid-1990s, and is certainly no luddite. So his reflections on how technology is changing what it means to be human are from the perspective of someone completely on the inside (it actually being hard to be anywhere else), though still with a memory of a non-digitalised life.

Everyone is writing about this, right? Hundreds of thousands of bloggers and miscellaneous digerati opine constantly on the subject, generally in a rather tedious and/or self-satisfied fashion. Not so Scott, whose frame of reference and scope are almost mind-blowingly broad. His book ranges from Greek myth, across the canon of Western literature and culture, to 70s and 80s TV shows, and the vicissitudes of Katie Price (aka Jordan). Nor is this done for effect, but out of genuine erudition, an attempt to examine what digital technology means for the human condition. Indeed, arguably, the digital subject of the book seems occasionally almost a constraint, somehow holding Scott back from achieving escape velocity into pure philosophy and metaphysics. 

Essentially what Scott is looking at is how the advent of universal connectivity is transforming the relationship between the individual and the world. The world meaning not only human society, though that is of course a large part of it, but also with the physical, geographical and natural world. Deep rooted psychological change is afoot, he argues, affecting, amongst other things, our linguistic decoding of our environment (a fascinating section on the "nounification" of language), our understanding of each other and of ourselves, the meaning of silence, our interpretation of events and our capacity for creative thought. These subjects are examined in a wonderfully elliptical way - sometimes he ranges so far from the starting point that one begins to forget what it was - thereby building up a highly nuanced, complex vision of digitised humanity. Some observations are small, but exceedingly perceptive, for example on the etiquette of social media exchanges and the new scope it provides for social power-play and anxiety, others are genuinely existential. 


This is not, lest you might think so, some kind of manifesto or call to action, unless it is a call simply to be conscious of what is happening to us, something it will be increasingly hard to do as memories of a pre-digital state of being fade into the past. Nor is it praise or denunciation of something perceived as good or bad, that would in any case be irrelevant as change and its effects are already here. The human condition has already been inalterably transformed, and humans with it. 

Laurence Scott. Yes, me too.
I also thought he'd look older and more professorial 

Occasionally, the thought crossed my mind, as it might yours, that this is all a bit overblown. Sure, we all (well, not "all", perhaps) spend too much time glancing at our phones, checking for messages, pictures, likes, comments, but does that mean we have changed fundamentally? Laurence argues that it does, both in terms of how each of us behave (and, yes, there are gradations of individual connectedness) and in terms of how our wider society operates, the latter being the reason none of us escape the transformation wrought by technology, including its consequences for our environment, our politics, our interactions, our culture. 

As "books about the internet" go (for all that that seems a reductive categorisation), this one is, I believe, something a bit special. It is neither fanboy adulation nor conspiracy theorist ranting - surely there are enough of those to go round - but something altogether more idiosyncratic and quirky, and perhaps also significant. It can be hard to grasp Scott's meaning a lot of the time (perhaps it takes a Will Self to know quite what to make of this book), but I would honestly say that, if you are in any way tempted by the idea of the cultural philosophy of digital technology, then this is a book you need to read.