The New York Times Book Review - Jacob Silverman
…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…Scott's erudition is impressive, as is his ability to catch hold of a cultural reference and worry out the last drops of insight.
Jacob Silverman - New York Times Book Review
Clever, allusive, with a capacious sense of humor, the book sizzles with intelligence.…it’s hard not to be charmed.
Jennifer Golbeck - Science
[The Four-Dimensional Human] is carefully crafted and eloquently written…A valuable book that brings a fresh perspective to the topic of life online and offline.
Will Self - Guardian
With his joyful phrase-making and sharp eye for the follies and absurdities of wired life, Scott would be the perfect investigator to report back on what it feels like to be…uploaded.
Sunday Times
Scott’s writing is exceptionally fine, and his cultural range extravagant…An astounding debut.
New Statesman
A probing and elegant meditation on the digital world’s ‘ways of being.’ Beyond the lovely precision of its diction and companionable voice, it is notable for its courage to write from inside the ambiguities and confusions of online life, to resist the easy pleasures of summary judgement.
Carol Tavris - Times Literary Supplement
Adds immeasurably to the burgeoning literature on what social media do to our innermost lives, relationships, and stance towards the world. [Scott] doesn’t travel on main roads—the familiar worries about technology—but rather on hidden byways marked by imagination and metaphor, where data cannot follow.
Booklist
Witty, intellectual.
Dane Carr - Booklist
Witty, intellectual.
Financial Times
In his study of our hyperactive internet age, Scott’s interest lies less in the technology than in we who use it. Scott’s references are admirably broad, spanning high and low culture in a layered and complex (and Samuel Johnson shortlisted) account.
Nicholas Carr
Here at last we have a portrait in full of our digitally extended, digitally entwined selves. With wit, intelligence, and tenderness, Laurence Scott explores the glowing, sprite-filled wonderland that we now inhabit and the silent, empty places that lie in its shadow.
Kirkus Reviews
2016-06-01
Is Airbnb the beginning of our end? Perhaps not, but, as this elegant meditation explores, it's just one more sign of our sterile, disembodied times.British social critic Scott's (English and Creative Writing/Arcadia Univ.) essay on the disembodiment and dislocation that come with technology has promise, at first, of being a kind of manifesto of the sort Jaron Lanier might issue, but it soon settles into a coolly McLuhan-esque treatise, rich in reference to the likes of Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin, on our dematerialized condition. Whereas Lanier, for instance, might take an alarmed view of the political implications of a world in which "the moments of our lives audition for digitization," Scott is more inclined to the existential and philosophical: we are both anonymous and exhaustively identified, seen and unseen, physical and virtual, isolated and connected, and, thanks to social media, everywhere at once. It is this last truth that lends credence to Scott's fruitful notion that we are all suddenly four-dimensional beings who can escape the ordinary laws of physics that bound us to time and place: "Where do our bodies begin and end in a networked world?" The answer is a little scary: at least the images that Scott conjures of the 1950s sci-fi denizen known as 4D Man suggest that our newfound "ability to slip through solid objects" may not be altogether a good thing. On the other hand, it may not be bad, either. As Scott writes, the novelist A.S. Byatt has observed that even though modern passers-by seem to have their eyeballs glued to their phones, "overall they seem happier than strangers did in her earlier years." Happier, perhaps, but certainly more tired, endlessly working to serve our technology. And more alike as well: Scott quotes Zadie Smith as noting that social media "can enforce uniformity," shouting us down into a kind of digital sameness that, he adds, "inevitably entails a constricting of personality." More Adorno than Negroponte but of interest to students of contemporary first-world culture.
