The Four-Dimensional Human review – where cyberspace and meatspace collide

Laurence Scott’s riffs on our new, endlessly connected world tease out the ways in which the internet is altering our sense of ourselves

“We shape our tools,” said Marshall McLuhan, “and afterwards they shape us.” The most powerful tool that humankind has invented in the past half century is the internet, and we are still trying to figure out what it is doing to us. This is no easy task, and it’s very much work in progress because we are still only in the early days of the transformation of our communications environment wrought by the net. It took us the best part of 400 years to understand how the last such revolution – the one triggered by Gutenberg – would play out, and the internet has only been a fixture in our daily lives since 1993, which in the long view of history is only the blink of an eye.

Our problem is not that we are short of information about this new force in our lives. On the contrary, we are awash with the stuff. It’s just that we have no idea what it all means. In that sense, we are in the state immortalised by Manuel Castells as that of “informed bewilderment”. Sure, we have some idea about what digital technology means for our economies and our daily lives. But what does it mean for us? What happens to our humanity in a digital age?

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