Review by New York Times Review
"THE FOUR-DIMENSIONAL HUMAN," the first book by the British writer Laurence Scott, is a curious entry in the crowded field of tech criticism. The book nimbly ranges across the charged and vexing aspects of digital life - the gradations of online friendship, trolls, the allure of voyeuristically monitoring old friends - while also neglecting some of its most fundamental issues. Surveillance is mentioned in passing, privacy appears a dim concern, and there's hardly a mention of any tech figure not named Zuckerberg or Page. You might finish the book without remembering that essential debates about power, speech and civil liberties are being hashed out not in public but in Silicon Valley boardrooms. At the same time, the economic and political conditions propagated by these companies - the tremendous income inequality, the progressive commoditization of everyday life and communications - seem to hover out of view, lending, like a distant moon, some gravity but not much light to the proceedings. Now that we've established all the things that "The Four-Dimensional Human" is not, it's important to emphasize what it is: namely, a considered perceptual and aesthetic tour through the digital sensorium. Clever, allusive, with a capacious sense of humor, the book sizzles with intelligence. Scott mixes observations of deep profundity and eloquence with some head-scratching notions about digital life. But through it all, "The Four-Dimensional Human" is sustained by such fine writing, as well as an eclectic palette of references, from Seamus Heaney to schlock horror films, that it's hard not to be charmed. I don't share Scott's belief in "the miracle of connectedness," but I do agree that the upheavals of our multimediated lives deserve critical assessment. The book's principal weakness may be its overarching conceit that we have all somehow become four-dimensional human beings. By this Scott seems to be referring to the many ways in which always-on connectivity, mobile technologies and various databases containing scattered bits of personal information have scrambled our relationship with the world. This proposition seems to call out for a dose of media history, say, by examining the ways in which previous communications technologies, from the telegram to television, contributed to a sense of disembodiment or of time stretching and unfolding in strange new ways. Scott overlooks those kinds of comparisons and instead trains his eye on the modern individual's relationship to the digital world, its bizarre new folkways and vast sense of possibility. Sometimes this causes him to slip into what feels like an unearned mysticism, marveling, for instance, at "the strange sorrow that Skype provokes" (by making us feel as if we're in more than one place at once). His tone can become elegiac and airy: "The children of digitization will grow up expecting to occupy space robustly and to live prolifically in one another's rooms. Their strength will be measured, like the density of muscle fibers, according to the knit of their connectedness." It's evidence of Scott's writerly skill that these extended metaphors don't collapse on themselves. The problem seems to be that Scott pulls off these dazzling analogies all too easily and that, consequently, he gets mired in this discursive mode in which symbols and interpretations pile ever more ponderously on top of one another. A chapter called "A Different Kind of Buzz" manages to draw impressive mileage out of the beehive and its numerous semiotic associations. Along the way, Scott invokes the influence of beehives on Western architecture, Hamlet, Dionysus ("born, like an accidental text message, of Zeus' thigh"), the video game series Grand Theft Auto and Marcel Duchamp, to name a few. Another chapter takes "All That Is Solid Melts Into Air," Marshall Berman's study of modernity, as a jumping-off point from which to consider how digital life, like capitalism, can seem immaterial yet ubiquitous and oppressive. The superabundance of content - endless parodies of cultural products that themselves are borrowed references to previous films, TV shows, jokes, memes or ideas we've all experienced a hundred times before - furnishes "the sense that life is a collection of likenesses, lived out elsewhere." The endless categorizing, hash-tagging and liking we engage in is a way of making sense of a world that seems populated by mass-produced variations of familiar themes. We face, then, a "crisis of originality," where "the pressure we feel when writing" something as simple as a Facebook birthday greeting "is the pressure of the artist. How do we make it new?" One response might be to burrow deeper into the meta-realm of reference and parody. Scott makes an unexpectedly persuasive case for how, in the movie "Scream," Wes Craven cleverly toyed with the very horror clichés he helped popularize. Stylized self-consciousness becomes a reasonable response to a lack of substance. Or sometimes the two are one and the same, as Scott finds in the "normcore" trend, in which the L.L. Bean-and-khaki wardrobes of white suburbanites were appropriated by urban hipsters. The point? Either to disappear into the urban masses or to signal a weary accommodation with a culture exhausted by the feeling that everything had been done before. Whether any of this hangs together for you may depend on your tolerance for the sort of cultural analysis in which a clearly brilliant critic spends pages worrying over subjects that sometimes seem less than worthy of his full attention. This isn't simply a matter of one's brow, high or low. Scott's consideration of Katie Price - Britain's Kim Kardashian, an omnipresent media star famous mostly for being famous - has some interesting things to say about the nature of celebrity, particularly in a social media culture in which we are often encouraged to act like microcelebrities of our own. But he's on shakier ground when marveling that Yo - an app whose function is limited to sending a simple "Yo" message to a recipient - "is an early example of style-resistant discourse, its willfully generic exterior containing an infinite variety of meaning." There may be something funny and even defiant about Yo's deliberate monotony, but I would pause before claiming that "this is a noble approach to the problem of continual novelty in a world composed of finite aesthetic possibilities." There are other points, too, where Scott gets lost in his thicket of interpretations. He revisits the public downfall of John Galliano, the chief designer for Christian Dior who was caught on video harassing some Jewish patrons in a Paris cafe, Galliano's scene caused him to be denounced by the actor Natalie Portman, who at the time was the face of a Dior perfume. "The public violence of Galliano's outburst," Scott asserts, reminded the world of Galliano and Portman's "positions as individuals in a corporate structure" and ensured that Portman, "as a cracked commodity," could "no longer maintain the coherent illusion she was paid to enact." On some higher analytical plane, this may be true, but it seems far more obvious that Portman, as a Jew, felt compelled to dissociate herself from someone who had made ugly antiSemitic comments. It's possible to finish "The FourDimensional Human" with the feeling of having contended with a great intellect who hasn't quite yet found his subject. Scott's erudition is impressive, as is his ability to catch hold of a cultural reference and worry out the last drops of insight. But his metaphysical vision causes him to neglect the material reality in front of him - the craven hunger of tech giants for personal data and influence over our decisions; the ways in which today's innovators have tried to prove their revolutionary bona fides by freighting their inventions with false myth and pathos. There's little doubt that the internet, writ large, has changed how we live. But to say that we, as human beings, are fundamentally different seems to grant our new digital technologies a kind of sentience and autonomy that they haven't yet earned. ? JACOB Silverman is the author of "Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
Before computers, we were three-dimensional. Now, Londoner Scott explains, thanks to smartphones, we are four-dimensional. He contrasts the freedom and anonymity of the early Internet with the continual and intrusive connections and exposure of today. Success has become synonymous with one's online clicks, hits, likes, and followers, power gained by popularity or notoriety on social media. Anything that is difficult to quantify, such as eccentric behavior, lacks online value unless it is objectified as a thing. This turns verbs from actions into subjects, turns unique experience into copied categories. Armed with the same reference points, our crowd-source minds corral the exceptional into the common. Only old-timers sleep without a cell phone flaring sounds and light into the dark room. Scott's witty, intellectual style rewards those who read closely, but readers might wish he confronted more basic issues: If replacing personal, unprocessed thought with organized data on screens is so bad, why does it permeate our lives? Why are we so hooked? And why is analysis and discussion about the digital realm dodged, especially by parents?--Carr, Dane Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Scott, an essayist and critic, offers a rich phenomenology of living in the digital age and its radical reshaping of fundamental human experiences. Based on the premise that "a culture reveals much about itself by the metaphors it uses," Scott sees in the early Internet-conceptualized by denizens as a "mode of transportation" for anonymous, disembodied selves-a parallel to the late-Victorian fascination with "the fourth dimension," popularly understood as "a space into which one might travel, a world that could be reached if only the right conduit or portal could be found." But when the "civic and commercial conservatism" of late capitalism "fuses with the true radicalism of digital life," the result is our current claustrophobia. Scott sketches the artistic, political, and environmental corollaries to show how "digital life is inherently suited to a language of the macabre and the monstrous." His keen attention to our digital diction is at its best in a brilliant analysis of our tendency to tag variegated online browsing as kinds of porn. Unlike many literary grumps, Scott writes eruditely from an embedded perspective shared by anyone who has ever settled an argument with a quick search of IMDb. Greek mythology and Dorian Gray come into play, not as fearful salvos against imagined hordes of digital barbarians, but rather used alongside pop culture as living artifacts whose interpretive value is up to the task of better understanding our lives now. Scott's sharp eye for irony and great wit make this debut a lively contribution to the conversation about the effects of the Internet on society. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
