Ways of being in the digital world
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? Laurence Scott reflects on these questions in this extract from his Jerwood Prize-winning book The Four-Dimensional Human.
A dominant idea in the history of modern western personhood has been that we’re fundamentally isolated from one another. Certain key figures, real and imagined, are gathered together, no doubt reluctantly, to make this argument: Descartes sitting in solitude at his fireside, sceptical of everything but his own mind; the fantasist Don Quixote, alone in his suspicion of windmills; the Princess of Cleves, moving between the seclusion of the boudoir and the convent; Robinson Crusoe on his island. That being an individual entails a sort of exile from others may be a story that we tell ourselves, but it is no less solid for that. Of course the irony here is that we also can’t seem to get enough of the pack. We gather our lonesome selves together in groups by day, clinging together in warm, mealy huddles by night. Yet no matter how tight the clinch, we’re still flung to different corners of the dreamscape.
In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens writes of ‘A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.’ An unnamed ‘I’ ponders the inscrutability of those closest to it, realising that ‘No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all.’ The image of a person as an unreadable book also appears in Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The Man of the Crowd’, in which one man follows another through the streets of London. This tale’s horror lies in the follower’s conclusion that he can never know the stranger he is following: ‘It will be in vain to follow, for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds.’ He imagines the stranger’s heart as being larger than a medieval book of prayer, and thinks how it ultimately may be ‘but one of the great mercies of God’ that it ‘does not permit itself to be read’.
If the ultimate solitariness of the modern person has been a well-told story, then how does this story contend with the spirit of the digital twenty-first century? As I consider this question, I pause too often to do a lap of that standard-issue circuit of websites, turning the keys in those letterboxes and jogging past the lives of others, who stand smiling and telling me things as I go by. The year is ending, and people on Facebook are posting a prefab review of the past twelve months. ‘It’s been a great year!’ the official script says. ‘Thanks for being a part of it.’ I click on one of f these retrospectives, posted by a friend on whom neither the corniness nor the irresistibility of this venture is lost. This friend, as represented in her string of aggregated pictures and captions, is a collage of other people, a luxuriating pet, interspersed between picturesque landscapes. Social media is an advocate of this brand of comradeliness, and encourages us to narrate our lives as legibly as possible, as ongoing books that invite themselves to be read.
At the same time, the various and non-stop opportunities for communication are notable for highlighting our isolation, and it’s perhaps this intensity of digital communicability that brings mythic proportions to mind. When the Olympian postman Hermes goes in search of Odysseus during the latter’s long confinement on Calypso’s island, he looks for him in a cave, but ‘Of Odysseus there was no sign, since he sat wretched as ever on the shore, troubling his heart with tears and sighs and grief. There he could gaze out over the rolling waves, with streaming eyes.’ I think of this weeping Odysseus sometimes, when I’m waiting with indecorous zeal for an email or a text, or when I catch myself peering into the rolling blue of Facebook, unable to remember for whom or what I’m looking. I see his yearning in miniature, in the five seconds it takes for someone to bring a phone from their pocket and put it back again. These are ship-in-a-bottle feelings, which life can accommodate. The otherwise cheerful and productive of us have cheerful, productive lives amid digital longings and desolations. But it is certainly true that invoking the messenger god is one of the constitutive practices of our times. It has become part of the rhythms of almost every waking hour, to look for a word or a sign from elsewhere. We want to feel the wind in our faces, with the full, oxygenating sense that we’re coursing along. Going online can feel like a step on a homeward journey, where it is the abstract promise of home, rather than any real sense of the home itself, which matters. We all know the pocket-sized shipwreck that occurs when an inbox shows us, with treacherous indifference, the pale, empty horizon of read emails.
The shipwreck-in-a-bottle is one of many new digital phenomena that have become part of our daily experience, and which complicate age-old ideas of personhood. It has long been the word on the street that, if you dabble in other realities, then you shouldn’t expect to remain unchanged
Lazarus was never his old self again. Visiting fairyland has its chronic side effects and implications: unnatural youth, blindness, contraindicated with trips through the wardrobe. Our portals to the fourth dimension have been wedged open, and there it is, spread out across the everyday, indeed nestled inside the everyday, causing it to ripple and bend. And now that the silhouette of a figure is resolving in the doorway, fringed in ghost-light, we can begin to consider what might be on their minds, what it feels like to be flushed with the hormones of Web 2.0. What new senses are available to someone who is such a concentrated blend of matter and media? What happens to the nervous system when it is exposed to the delights and pressures and weird sorrows of networked life? How does time pass in this dimension? What dreams begin to prey on a four-dimensional mind? What are the paradoxes and ironies of owning a four-dimensional body, with its marvellous new musculature?
A crucial tension of our times is that, although we can luxuriate in this gained dimension, stretching our lives into the world like never before, we are simultaneously asked to ignore, deny, accept, strategise or rail against the hypothesis that our physical planet is diminishing. Just as the fourth dimension is opening up before us, our old-world trio is, by all intuitive accounts, in crisis. The macabre package of images and arguments, grouped under the deceptively benign term ‘climate change’, ticks like a telltale heart beneath the fibre-optic cables. A discernible atmosphere has emerged in these times from the collision between the digital boom and the ecological bust. One prevailing style of online being suggests a tireless lust for life. Social media steers us into co-producing a catalogue of daily rapture. The tacit caption beneath uploaded photographs is, not infrequently, ‘Behold!’ There’s a general intoxication over the well-framed moment, and we have a hunger for beautiful vistas that was not a pre-digital appetite. People younger than me look up at a building hit with late-afternoon light and think, ‘That’s ’grammable.’ We say a new sort of grace with the click of a camera and give thanks for our loved ones, a scrum of more or less willing smiles. We share good songs and good writing; we like all manner of propositions and support one another. Yet in between this digital fervour, we have little choice but to live with the apocalyptic sentiment in our water supply.
— You have been reading from The Four-Dimensional Human by Laurence Scott.
