four-dimensional human : ways of being in the digital world

This is a curious book; a text that in its physical production – its writing, its publication and possibly even its reception – says much more than its actual words disclose. Which is not to say those words are badly written or otherwise lacking. Laurence Scott has set himself the formidable task of registering the impact of the new digital technologies on our cognition, our perception and our emotions; in short, our phenomenology in its broadest sense. Other pundits take on the political, economic and social changes occasioned by the world wide web and the internet – Scott busies himself with the existential ones. The four-dimensional humans of the book’s title are our wired selves, compelled increasingly to inhabit an environment in which the old certainties of space and time are being disrupted by a global network that abolishes distance and privileges instantaneousness.