'We have an Everywhereness to Us Now...'

One is quite spontaneously reminded of the mighty Heidegger and his three ways of being, from his most profoundest philosophical musings of the century, Being and Time, when one gets to read Professor Laurence Scott’s The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World. 

Well, in short, the book is all about how our ‘networked lives’ have made us all ‘four-dimensional humans,’ and how it has in effect, profoundly impacted our experience as humans, and how this new 'digitized human' in us, is constantly affected in his/her thoughts by a constant stream of ‘mediated’, ‘filtered’, ‘skewed’, and ‘tutored’ news, views, information and gossip every second and every minute of our lived lives on this planet, in this ‘multimediated’ existence of ours!

Scott’s lively illustrations, his vivid examples and his highly personal narrative style make this book a well-meaning read and an unputdownable one at that!

I guess it musta taken this youngy professor such huge commitment and dedication on his part to have worked on a book of this magnitude! All of us, in this present dispensation could so easily relate to all that’s said and contained within this 190-page read, even as we browse our way through each and every page of this revelatory read of sorts!

And yes! Even a cursory feel into the ‘thisness’ of this book would really vouchsafe to the existential and the philosophical tinge that permeates through the entire gamut of this book.

The book also lends ample credence to the famed notion that, humans are indeed insignificant specks in a depersonalized universe! Or rather, a dislocated, a dematerialized and a disembodied universe rolled in one!

Yes! Scott uses the expression ‘disembodied’ on a highly existential note here in this book! And I quote –

If our bodies have traditionally provided the basic outline of our presence in the world, then we can’t enter a networked environment, in which we present ourselves in multiple places at once, without rethinking the scope and limits of embodiment.

While we sit next to one person, smiling through a screen at someone else, our thoughts, our visions, our offhand and heartfelt declarations materialise in fragments in one another’s pockets.

It’s astonishing to think how in the last twenty years the limits and coherence of our bodies have been so radically redefined. We have an everywhereness to us now that inevitably alters our relationship to those stalwart human aspects of self-containment, remoteness and isolation.

Like the 4D Man, we are able to insubstantiate ourselves to the point that the solid stuff around us seems insubstantial. Unlike this jealous genius, however, we can be on both sides of the wall at once.

Yes! This ‘everywhereness’ could connote to mean that, we are somewhere else when we are here! Or rather, we are here, when we are everywhere else!

At the same time, what’s double the redeeming about this book is the fact that, the book doesn’t forebode a disastrous dystopic vision of the future for humankind! Rather it gently coaxes and cajoles us to think about what it would be like to be wired 24 x 7 to the cloud every breathing moment of our lives!

No spoilers though! ;-) The book is all yours for grabs at Rs.475/- on flipkart, or for just around six dollars, if you’re an Amazonian bum!

Well, I’ve wanted to compare this occidental school of thought from Scott in the present  times, to the oriental school of thought from the past where Dr. Radhakrishnan, an illustrious past student of MCC, and the second President of India, says about this ‘loss of subjectivity!’

To Dr. Radhakrishnan, humans were never meant to be insignificant specks in a depersonalized universe! Rather, humans tend to become 'insignificant specks' the moment they start looking on the outside, and forget to look within - onto their inward subjectivity!

Thus, when we forget to look at our 'inward subjectivity' that is so rightfully ours, we tend to lose ourselves completely in the world, and to the world, that we then tend to confuse ‘being’ with ‘having,’ and subsequently wallow in the world as in a dark miry bog, acquiring for ourselves materialistic possessions and things with such haste and such greed!

Dr. Radhakrishnan adds to say that, instead of we making use of our houses,  our wealth and our possessions, we allow them to possess us entirely! Therein lies the fact of the matter!

How much of this age-old sage-wisdom from off the past, gels to a tee with this Scott-ian rubric that he’s so wondrously put forth in his Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World.

On a personal note, I guess we rarely realize the beautiful fact that we have a lovely personal space, an unmediated wonderful space of our own that is so completely ours, in which we can know ourselves, be ourselves, and celebrate ourselves!

Requoting Wordsworth, ‘Little do we see in ourselves that is ours! I intend to mean that wonderful ‘inward subjectivity’ that Dr. Radhakrishnan talks about!

Again, we have, as Wordsworth says, given our hearts away to the world! Reminds us of Marlowe's 'Dr. Faustus,' the renowned German scholar, who was so passionate on learning the black arts, that, in spite of sustained warnings from Mephistopheles about the dangers of hell, he boldly resolves to barter his soul to the devil for twenty four long years, in exchange for his service to him! Scott reminds us of such a situation where not only our souls, but our bodies and minds as well, have been surrendered completely at the feet of technology that mediates, controls and dictates every minute of our lives 24 x 7! 

So wherein really lies the solution?

There’s no simple solutions for a problem of this magnitude! But we could begin somewhere! Ain't we? The journey of a thousand miles, as our munnorgal have rightly said, begins with a single step! Alley?

When our sense of identity lies in connecting with our jobs that we do, the people we work for, the friends we connect with, the groups we are immersed in, the places of worship we congregate in, or the houses we live in, we get to develop within us a great sense of insecurity from deep within, and we literally cannot bear to see it, or come to terms with it, the moment we feel that the security of these attachments to which we are strongly attached to, gives us a rude jolt or a even gentle shake!

The reason? We believe that our identity lies entirely on the outside. And that’s why even when any ONE of our attachments alters or changes or are entirely lost to us, we feel threatened or shaken or afraid to the core!

That’s because we think that our safety and security comes from the outside! And that's one reason why we spend all of our precious lives chasing money, chasing possessions, chasing for friends on instagram or facebook or whatsapp, because we tend to overlook on our inward subjectivity all of the time! The truth of the matter is that, there’s literally no need whatsoever, to chase after money or things or possessions or people in this world. 

It’s only as good as chasing a mirage!

Carl Jung says, ‘Who looks outside dreams! Who looks inside, awakens!' Therein, i surmise, lies the answer of all answers!

To conclude in Jidduji’s mighty phrasing,

“Look within. You are the world.”

Well! That’s all ye know on earth and all ye need to know!

You might also want to read a similar past post on our blog HERE. It's titled, Know Thyself!

images: britishcouncildotru, amazondotcom, pinterestdotcom