Just Finished Reading: The Four-Dimensional Human – Ways of Being in the Digital World by Laurence Scott (FP: 2015)

This is not an easy book to precis so I’m not really going to try. Instead I’ll try to give a flavour of what it was about and what I thought of it. It’s hard not to notice how technology and the use of it changes things – most especially human nature. We’ve all seen ‘zombies’ walking around staring intently into their palms often completely oblivious to what’s going on around them. This is what the author means when he talks about 4D humans – not the zombification of humanity but to people being ‘elsewhere’ why still, at least technically, being here in the normal 3D world at the same time. When we’re online (for example by reading this poor excuse for a book review) where exactly are we? We might be physically located in our home office, den or kitchen but we are also in cyberspace hopping from webpage to webpage on computers that might be based hundreds of miles away from our actual location. Although we have not physically moved it could be argued that part of our mind and certainly our attention has gone through the screen in front of our eyes and is actually traversing the data streams along with the bits and bytes that make up the virtual world. Or take online gaming. Most nights I sit in my spare room/office/library chatting to my friends using VOIP (Voice Over IP) and it feels like we’re in the same room and not 10, 15, 20 miles apart. At the same time we might be playing a game together which is being run on a server in Paris but gives the impression of being on another world. So, were exactly is the game taking place? Paris? My spare room? Somewhere in cyberspace? Just on my home computer or all of the above? These days that is not an idle question.

As more and more people spend ever longer and ever more of their lives ‘on-line’ what does it do to both the on-line and off-line persona? Now I admit that I am one of those strange folk that isn’t, and never has been, on Facebook. I’ve never used Twitter or Instagram or Snapchat. My on-line ‘presence’ is this Blog – period. That being the case I was often one or two steps removed from the authors tales of Facebook accounts of long dead individuals still getting posts, of the questionable thrill of delving too deeply into someone’s profile, of long-distance empathy, sorrow or regret as friends unspoken to for years or decades, get married, have children, split up, grow old and one day, vanish for never discovered reasons. The author also points to the strange rigidity of on-line existence. In the early days it was often thought that the Internet would herald in a new age of liberty. No one, it was stated with confidence, on the Internet knows you’re a dog. How wonderfully naïve that was. Today your on-line identity needs to be as detailed and as unchanging as possible. Without a steamer trunk of history how does Airbnb know who you are and that you can be trusted? Without a detailed and verified digital passport how can advertisers know which targeted adverts will do the most good when they land in your in-box of pop-up on your feed. Be who you want to be in meat-space but in cyberspace without your glowing ID badge your entry will be denied.

Ranging over pop culture, personal experience, literary references to Shakespeare and to popular movies this is an interesting and thoughtful read. I did roll my eyes a few times and did think he was trying too hard to impress – successfully it seems as this work won The Jerwood Prize and was shortlisted for The Samuel Johnson Prize – but overall I was impressed enough to finish it in short order. More IT related reads to come.