A spellbinding examination of the nature of reality, by one of the brightest thinkers of today.
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.
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.
*Guardian, 'Book of the Week'*
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.
*Wired, 'Books of the Year'*
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.
*Sunday Times*
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.
*i Paper*
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.
*Mail on Sunday*
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