The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2015

WINNER OF THE JERWOOD PRIZE

'Mercurially brilliant' Will Self

'A richly complex portayal of the ways we live today' TLS

'A delightfully tender and humane guide to transformations that might amaze Ovid and new forms of nostalgia to rival Proust' Alexandra Harris
'Entertaining and insightful' Sunday Times

'Elegant and artful' Financial Times

A constellation of everyday digital phenomena is rewiring our inner lives. We are increasingly coaxed from the three-dimensional containment of our pre-digital selves into a wonderful and eerie fourth dimension, a world of ceaseless communication, instant information and global connection.

Our portals to this new world have been wedged open, and the silhouette of a figure is slowly taking shape. But what does it feel like to be four-dimensional? How do digital technologies influence the rhythms of our thoughts, the style and tilt of our consciousness? What new sensitivities and sensibilities are emerging with our exposure to the delights, sorrows and anxieties of a networked world? And how do we live in public, with these recoded private lives?

Tackling ideas of time, space, friendship, commerce, pursuit and escape, and moving from Hamlet to the ghosts of social media, from Seinfeld to the fall of Gaddafi, from Facebook politics to Oedipus, The Four-Dimensional Human is a highly original and pioneering portrait of life in a digital landscape.