If the noughties was the decade in which the digital revolution liquefied before evaporating into clouds, so far this decade seems set on warning of brewing storms of discontent and the increasingly acidic rain trickling down the glass between our human and online selves. The catalogue of Cassandras decrying the digital is now considerable and so it is a minor relief to find Laurence Scott's debut book adopting the ambivalent, indeed almost mildly approving, tone of J.G. Ballard towards the technological zeitgeist.
A recent Ofcom survey found that Internet users aged 16 and over now spend around 27 hours a week online. With this kind of statistic in mind Scott presents the view that the internet now saturates the contemporary world and the minutiae of our lived experience to such an intense degree that the digital has come to represent a fourth dimension. In a way, Marcuse's theory of the 'One Dimensional Man' as a blank canvas flattened by 20th century capitalism and scientific rationalism has been hoisted aloft by the centre pole of the hyperreal.
The Situationists were writing about the possible response of the individual to the post-modern ‘spectacle’ of cybernetics and the consumer culture decades before anyone had any notion of an online self that could be categorised as four-dimensional. Whereas writers such as Guy Debord saw the response, in the socio-political context of 1968, as revolutionary in nature, Scott, as much in tune with the spirit of his own generation as Debord, prefers to channel ambivalence and nostalgic distraction.
As such, the book builds upon the semiotic scaffold of Umberto Eco with his 'Travels in Hyperreality’, exploring the communal loneliness and 'melancholia of inconsequential proximity' that radiates like a dull ache through the glare of the now-digitised spectacle.
Scott is successful in capturing a bounty of incidental emotions and impulses that characterise the fourth dimension. He scrutinises the skeuomorphs of digital life, the banal neologisms ('VoiceChat', 'life hacks'), the resurgence of Gothic terminology (trolls, ghosts, stalking), and the unstoppable digitisation of the physical landscape by Google Maps. He also pinpoints the creative artist's increasing struggle for particularity with Google immolating any pretensions to original thought; the sense of entrapment in the compulsive go-round of websites; and describes the 'ship-in-a-bottle feelings...the pocket-sized shipwreck that occurs when an inbox shows us, with treacherous indifference, the pale, empty horizon of read emails.'
Peppered with great aphoristic sentences such as this, and largely devoid of the weighty sociological academe of the Frankfurt School writers, the book succeeds through its striking readability. Like the philosopher John Gray, Scott favours as imaginative touchstones for his theories the lessons from literature, poetry and age-old myths that resonate through cultures and ride in the slipstream of accelerating technologies.
Writers such as Henry James, Herman Melville and James Joyce are invoked alongside a mish-mash of ephemera from Mr Men to Love Actually, Seinfeld to Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, scored through with autobiographical vignettes. It feels like it shouldn't work, and some points lack the cohesion of others, but curiously the overriding impression is one of reading an accurate textual portrayal of the scattered and disparate internet experience itself.
The potency of Scott's associative thinking is what gives the book its vitality. He frequently engineers collisions between two ostensibly unrelated events that explode into new possibilities of interpretation. In terms of contemporary perspective, James Lovelock's Gaia theory of equilibrium is taken as the macroscopic apocalyptic view of the world counter-weighted by the gossip columns of Katie Price as the microscopic celebrity non-event.
Similarly, the Marxian process of reification being brought to bear on the powers of the digital information economy to commoditise the past is the tune to which the 2011 John Galliano scandal is made to dance a tenuous bolero with the exposure of LSE and several pop stars' financial links to the Gaddafi regime. The ice is slippery but the theory somehow manages to stay on its feet.
For all its strengths, there is the inescapable impression that the book is conspicuous by what it chooses to overlook. Considering the subtitle 'Ways of being in the digital world', there is barely anything on the way primal instincts of human nature - sex and violence - have been recalibrated in the digital dimension, whereby one can traverse from hardcore pornography to desert videos of Isis beheadings in an evolutionary supernova of clicks.
The book is similarly light on historical contextualising. It is a shame there is no examination of Edward Bernays and the way in which public relations became an engine for manufacturing mass control and docility through rapacious consumption, turning us into 'happiness machines', which would seem to be the direct paradigm for today's 'clicktivism' and self-promotion through social media.
The future is given similar short-shrift; the author seems reluctant to posit a forward view or indicate a possible direction of travel, which considering the bounteous scope for discussion - anonymity and privacy post-Snowden, the Singularity, transhumanism, the 'Internet of Things' and its proposed impact on our experience of urban space - feels like something of a missed opportunity. Scott pins vignettes and canny observations under glass like a lepidopterist, noting their unique markings before letting them flutter away without consequence, which adds to the book's readability even if occasionally you long for them to be bulked out with the taxidermy of interrogative thought.
Overall though, one could be forgiven for thinking that given the frantic exponential rate of online change (an average website's lifespan is now reputed to be around 18 months), this apposite and witty exploration of the digital quotidian could, by being so focused on contemporary mores, be rendered strangely out-of-date by the time it even gets to a paperback edition. On the basis of this debut work though, it is clear the author's career may have rather more longevity.
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