Laurence Scott – författare

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Picnic Comma Lightning written and read by Laurence Scott.**A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK**''Clever, funny and deeply moving... an engaging and thought-provoking journey through the fakery of modern life.'' Mail on Sunday''A stylish, playful exploration of what digital life is doing to the way we find meaning in the world.'' Guardian, ''Book of the Week''________________________In Vladimir Nabokov''s Lolita, the narrator offers a memorably brief account of his mother’s death: ''picnic, lightning''. Picnic Comma Lightning similarly opens with the death of Laurence Scott''s parents, and the definitive ending of their death raises for him one fundamental question: how much of what we live through is truly real?With humour and insight, Scott transforms this personal meditation on loss into an exploration of what it means to exist in the world now. It used to be that our vision of the world was rooted to reasonably solid things: to people, places and memories. But today, in an age of constant internet debates, online personas and alternative truths, reality feels more vulnerable than ever before. Picnic Comma Lightning looks at how digital life is distorting, echoing and magnifying our age-old preoccupation with what is real and what isn''t. Where do we draw the line? How is technology shifting these boundaries? And how do we maintain a sense of reality in an increasingly unreal world?________________________''A report from the front line of the digital generation by someone superbly well-equipped to read and decode the signals.'' Sunday Times

You are a four-dimensional human.

Each of us exists in three-dimensional physical space. But, as a constellation of everyday digital phenomena rewires our lives, we are increasingly coaxed from the containment of our predigital 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?

Laurence Scott―hailed as a "New Generation Thinker" by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC―shows how this four-dimensional life is dramatically changing us by redefining our social lives and extending the limits of our presence in the world. Blending tech philosophy with insights on everything from Seinfeld to the fall of Gaddafi, Scott stands with a rising generation of social critics hoping to understand our new reality. His virtuosic debut is a revelatory and original exploration of life in the digital age.