Arcadia England

By now we hope you have heard the news about Dr Laurence Scott's upcoming publication. That said, we never tire of talking about it.  For those of you that are not aware, The Four Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World will be released on June 18th and it won Dr Scott the Jerwood Prize.

Happily, Laurence himself has written a few words for us.

I wrote The Four-Dimensional Human because I knew that the digital revolution was influencing both our inner lives and the sense of ourselves as people moving about the world. How could it not? Digitisation has totally changed the nature of our public identities, as well as creating a whole legion of more or less subtle emotions, neuroses, delights, and anxieties. And so I wanted to capture the feeling of being digitised. This sometimes meant that I had to write about quite private reactions to digital life -- the  moods triggered by being on social media, for example, or the chronic suspense of waiting for an email, any email, some voice from beyond! I had to trust that my confessions would seem familiar to others, and might even articulate things that many of us were experiencing. It's lucky that writers require a certain stubborn shamelessness, which stops them from feeling too abashed at what they reveal about themselves!

Besides the sections of memoir and personal anecdote, I wanted to think carefully about the implications of digital life on our notions of 'what a human is', often by comparing these current notions with those from the past. Literature is a great archive of examples that suggest how historically we have built up an idea of 'personhood.' So, in the book I use my literary training to make connections between the past and the present. You can go back to the Greeks, for instance, or Shakespeare, and see how foundational Western writers have formulated 'the human' in terms of some basic ideas of solitariness -- being present sometimes and absent or lost at others -- and it quickly becomes apparent how digital technologies are recoding these fundamental qualities. It's certainly a strange time to be moving around the world, which has gained this extra dimension seemingly overnight.