The Four Dimensional Human

Like the past, the news is with us more today than it was, and thus with wireless access comes a certain tariff to our peace of mind. For as long as I can remember, the news has often been a brochure of ways to die, and its instinct is to feast on both the rare and the epidemic, the two extremes of sensationalism. But now with smartphones, in particular, we are exposed to this doom media on the hoof, ensuring in our lives a steady dripfeed of apocalyptic sentiment. This morbid backdrop to daily life produces a form of unregulated consumption that is altering our ability to prioritise our fears and is encouraging, in those susceptible to such ideas, the notion that time is winding down. If the past is faring well in the fourth dimension, the future is not looking as robust.

We have the sense that, in order to be seeing what we’re seeing, we must have somehow broken in, a feeling that mistakes a display case for a vault. This confusion is one outcome of reversing the peephole: the intimate view into the private lives of others can seem ill-gotten, even illegal, despite the fact that our vision has been sanctioned, indeed invited. We can’t believe that such intimacies, once held inside the vault of privacy and decorum, could possibly be on display. Our three-dimensional manners have yet to catch up with four-dimensional norms of revelation.

‘Social media’ as a formal topic is generally a troubled one. At such times it is characterised as an addictive substance, a depressant that needs to be managed and curbed. Everyone knows someone perpetually on the brink of quitting Facebook. One hypothesis for this malaise suggests that the gloss people give to their crafted online personae creates an epidemic of inferiority among those of us watching them, as well as an ongoing amnesia towards our own canny uploads. This gulf widens when you consider where we do this watching: from the unglamorous heap of our insomnia, on the choked bus to work, the windows so fogged with kettled breath that you can’t even dream out of them. If this hypothesis is true, then when people log on to social media, they are apt to feel as though entering a joust, with their friends’ successes and wit, their general robustness for life, coming at them like lances. The overt and odious phrase ‘You win the internet’ – deployed to congratulate an exemplary piece of digital behaviour – does nothing to soothe suspicions of tacit competitiveness.

The inferiority theory is too easy to be the whole story, but nevertheless there is a strong and widespread feeling that our relationship with digital technologies has to be managed as a sort of chronic problem. Simultaneously we are rightly enamoured with all the ease and enrichment they provide. The four-dimensional human thus regularly experiences two types of breathlessness. The first is due to the thrill of roving over the world, of dropping in on a sibling and their baby on another continent, of staying for five minutes and laughing the whole time, then swooping back into your skin. The second breathlessness is not cheerful, and arises in the moments when all this liberty seems to come at the price of its opposite, when the sum of digital life feels more like a cage than a flying carpet. The ongoing narrative of toxicity and depression that shadows digital progress, in conjunction with a sense that this progress is both for the best and inevitable, creates a pervasive atmosphere of claustrophobia. The weather is often close in the fourth dimension. A small signal of this confinement is how the phrase ‘surfing the internet’ is used much less frequently now than in the old days. Rather than coursing the waves, we are simply, immovably, online. When multiple aspects of digital life are consistently figured as sources, suspected or confirmed, of bodily and psychological pollution, then our irreversible journey deeper and deeper into the network can, in one’s less hardy moments, feel like an imprisonment. As a result, when sleep does come, the four-dimensional human begins to dream of escape.