I love my program.  Throughout the term Arcadia has hosted various Talk of the Town events where they bring in a member of the London community to speak on a particular topic.  This past Wednesday I joined a group of Arcadia students in the cozy, dimly lit upper lounge of a West End pub called the Perseverance.  Dr. Laurence Scott, an Arcadia professor, read excerpts from his new book “The Four-Dimensional Human”  and facilitated a discussion alongside his editor Tom Avery.  In his soon to be published book, Scott argues that humans are being coaxed from their three-dimensional containment of our pre-digital selves into a wonderful and eerie fourth-dimension, a world of ceaseless communication, instant information and global connection.

Needless to say, a room full of Communication and journalism majors stoked a flavorful and thought-provoking conversation about the implications of technology’s ever encroaching presence in conjunction with  our inevitable reliance and how the sum of these is literally changing our physiology and understanding of the human condition.  We wake and and fall asleep  under the influence of technology.  We work, educate, research, learn, dictate, orchestrate, and in a larger sense operate with the heavy aid of machinery and other hosts of zeros and ones.

Tom Avery, Dr. Scott’s editor explained the cover art for the book: a cabin in a wooded area with a goole-like GPS pin hovering over the roof with a computer-screen blue glow emanating from the house.  This imagery conveys the meaning in sobering simplicity.  A place where authors like George Bernard Shaw,  Henry David Thoreau and Virginia Woolf could go to be off the grid and get lost in a realm of disconnection and solitude is now a place you can still check your twitter feed.  Why stop there when you can now check your twitter feed in Mars…just let that sink in for a while.

Hinging on the the topic of breaching the boundary of time and space, I brought up a phenomenon study abroad students are all too familiar with.  Skype calls back home.  I am constantly aware of the time difference between London and Texas and what my friends and family are doing at what time so we can find a small point in time to converge.  It’s the strangest thing to see beyond the screen into the 3D world that is my house, and it would appear that it’s right here in my flat in London.  But in reality, it’s six hours behind, and 4,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.

Skype and FaceTime also change our perception of human connection.  The only senses I can use to connect with my best friend back home is sight and hearing.  Yet, we blow kisses, and wiggle our pinkies in front to the camera to make pinkly promises and I always hug my mommy good night.  But all I really did was smother my cold, metal laptop in my chest.  Does our brain know the difference.  It looks like mommy, it sounds like mommy, so it must be mommy, right?

While Dr. Scott doesn’t map out the answers to all of these technological queries, he most certainly makes an essential contribution to a conversation that evolves almost as quickly as it’s subject does.

Who knew that a colony of zeroes and ones would one day rule the world.

Talk of The Town: The Four-Dimensional Human by Bria Woods is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.