麻豆社

An innovative examination of the nature of reality in the 21st century by award-winning author Laurence Scott - part personal memoir, part philosophical exploration. Read by Stephen Mangan.

In today's final episode, he explores the vogue for obsessive personal accounting - taking in fit-bits, Scrooge, posts about death on the internet, and the author's sense of his own parents' presence after their death, a benign haunting.

Laurence Scott says, "Any fluctuating, quantifiable thing - daily footsteps, calories burnt, number of re-tweets, YouTube views, Airbnb reviews, crypto-currency values - invites an obsessive and solipsistic sort of accountancy. We 're regularly provided with new ways to think about our lives numerically, giving us a model for our realities that favours concretion over abstraction, quantity over quality. We can now track so many aspects of life that they stream like stock prices along the bottom of our minds. As a consequence, we 're spending more and more time locked in the existential counting house, poring over ledgers that could only possibly be of interest to ourselves..."

Laurence Scott is a writer, broadcaster, academic and a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Arcadia in London. He is author of The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize, won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize, and was named the Sunday Times Thought Book of the Year. In 2011 he was named one of ten New Generation Thinkers by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the 麻豆社.

Read by Stephen Mangan
Adapted by Elizabeth Burke
Produced by Alexandra Quinn
A Loftus production for 麻豆社 Radio 4.