Laurence Scott
Writer, Broadcaster, Tennis Player
Laurence Scott is a cultural commentator specializing in how digital technologies affect our sense of personhood.
His first book The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the
Digital World (2015) was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson (now Baillie Gifford) Prize, won the Jerwood Prize for Non-Fiction, and was the Sunday Times ‘Thought Book of the Year’. His latest book Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. He often writes for publications such as NewYorker.com, Wired, Financial Times, Guardian, and the London Review of Books. He presents BBC Radio 3’s ideas programme, Free Thinking, and teaches at New York University in London.
What piece of work are you most proud of?
Pride isn’t one of my go-to emotions, but using the metaphor of the Fourth Dimension to understand and explore digital life feels like a useful achievement.
What tool would you add to our Survival Kit for the future?
I’d like to invent some sort of bleeper to remind us all regularly that there’s a difference between private life and public life, and that we confuse the two at our peril.