The Four Dimensional Human Ways Of Being In The Digital World

You are a four-dimensional human. Each of us exists in three-dimensional, physical space. But, as a constellation of everyday digital phenomena rewires our lives, we are increasingly coaxed from the containment of our predigital selves into a wonderful and eerie fourth dimension, a world of ceaseless communication, instant information, and global connection. Our portals to this new world have been wedged open, and the silhouette of a figure is slowly taking shape. But what does it feel like to be four-dimensional? How do digital technologies influence the rhythms of our thoughts, the style and tilt of our consciousness? What new sensitivities and sensibilities are emerging with our exposure to the delights, sorrows, and anxieties of a networked world? And how do we live in public with these recoded private lives? Laurence Scott—hailed as a “New Generation Thinker” by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC—shows how this four-dimensional life is dramatically changing us by redefining our social lives and extending the limits of our presence in the world. Blending tech-philosophy with insights on everything from Seinfeld to the fall of Gaddafi, Scott stands with a rising generation of social critics hoping to understand our new reality. His virtuosic debut is a revelatory and original exploration of life in the digital age.

The global retail industry is in the early stages of an era of profound and unprecedented, change. This book is intended to serve as a wide-ranging, robust, and practical guide to leaders of enterprises tasked with both understanding and delivering success in the new landscape of retailing. Part 1 describes the major directions and drivers of change that define the new retail landscape. Accelerating changes in technology, the rise to international prominence of internet enabled shoppers, and the rapid emergence of entirely new retail enterprises and business models are combining to re-shape the very fundamentals of the retail industry. No longer are shops central or even necessary to the business of retailing. No longer is choice for the shopper limited to the neighbourhood, town, or even country in which they live. No longer is the act of retailing solely the preserve of traditional retail enterprises as internet-enabled businesses, technology, logistics, suppliers, and financial services enterprises all seek direct relationships with the shopper. The new landscape of retailing is an unforgiving one. Success can be achieved more quickly than ever before, but failure is equally rapid. New opportunities are profound, but so too are the challenges. Part 2 of this book discusses the structures, skills, and capabilities that retail enterprises and their leaders will need if they are to be successful. This second edition presents more than 25 detailed case studies of innovative and successful enterprises alongside more than one hundred smaller examples to illustrate the themes discussed. A new afterword also presents ten central areas business leaders must focus on in order to build organizational resilienc in the wake of COVID-19 and the profound uncertainties retail enterprises now face. Frameworks and practical guidance are offered to help readers contextualise the nature of change occurring on a global scale, and identify the capabilities, skills, and perspectives that will be needed at both an enterprise and a personal leadership level.

Tied to the profundity of life and death, media are and have always been existential. Yet, as they are deeply embedded in the lifeworld on both individual and global scales, they currently capitalize on human existence seemingly without limit, while being mythologized as boundless harbingers of the future and as solutions to the predicaments of a world now poised on the edge. In this situation it is imperative to move beyond either the habitual or the sublime, to recognize that media are in fact of limits--situated both in the middle of our lives and at the limit they constitute the building blocks and brinks of being. In order to remedy the existential deficit in the field, in Existential Media Amanda Lagerkvist revisits existential philosophy through a reappreciation of Karl Jaspers' philosophy, and of his concept of the limit situation: those ultimate moments in life--of loss, crisis and guilt--which we are called upon to seize. Introducing the field of existential media studies in conversation with disability studies, the new materialism and the environmental humanities, the book offers a media theory of the limit situation which brings limits, in all their shapes and forms, onto the radar when we interrogate media. Lagerkvist argues that the present age of deep techno-cultural saturation, and of escalating calamitous and interrelated crises, is a digital limit situation, in which there are profound stakes which heighten existential uncertainty, vulnerability as well as potential fecundity. Placing the mourner--the coexister--at the center of media studies, by entering into the slow fields of mourning, commemorating and speaking to the dead in the online environment, she brings out that existential media ambivalently offer metric parameters, caring lifelines and transcendent experiences which ultimately display post-interactive modes of being digital in slowness, silence and waiting. The book ultimately calls forth a different ethos which powerfully challenges ideals of limitlessness, quantification and speed, and seeks out alternate intellectual and ethical coordinates for reclaiming, imagining and anticipating a responsible future with existential media.

Written by Martin Illingworth, Forget School: Why young people are succeeding on their own terms and what schools can do to avoid being left behind is a wide-reaching, engaging enquiry into the things that young people actually need from their education. Schools are at a crossroads: either they respond to the real world of change, challenges and possibilities that face young people, or they become irrelevant. Young people need to network effectively, manage their finances responsibly, and be digitally proficient and alert to the world around them. If schools do not adapt their provision to nurture these capabilities, then today's youth will increasingly turn to alternative sources to seek out the education they need. Drawing on the experiences of young self-employed adults, Martin Illingworth's Forget School shares key insights into the ways in which education can be recalibrated to better support young people. In doing so he provides practical suggestions around how schooling culture, curriculum design and pedagogical approaches can be reconfigured in readiness for the emerging shifts and trends in 21st century life and employment. Martin sheds light on how young people perceive school's current provision, and offers greater insight into what they think needs to change if education is to work for generations to come. He also explores the importance of digital proficiency in the 21st century and how young people, as digital natives, both acquire it and leverage its benefits independently of school instruction. Essential reading for anyone working in education.

Inequality is widening. In the twenty-first century, the gap between those who have more and those who have less is growing: 1 per cent of the world owns as much as the other 99 per cent. Should we be worried? Christopher Steed, author of the acclaimed A Question of Worth, argues that inequality does indeed matter: that economic fairness is one of the defining issues of our time. In a world conditioned by social media, enabling intensified social comparison, the anxieties and effects of contemporary inequality are a cause for huge concern. Despite a wealth of research around inequality most studies have concentrated on its quantitative aspects. In A Question of Inequality, Christopher Steed is concerned with exploring why inequality matters, what it means for those who find themselves victims of it, and what can be done about it. He probes what it means to experience inequality, drawing out case studies on the effects of poverty. In proposing a theory of social relativity the author provides new insights into the effects and meaning of inequality and makes an original and important contribution to a key issue facing the world today.

What does it mean to feel time, to sense its passing along the sinews and nerves of the body as much as the synapses of the mind? And how do books, as material arrangements of print and paper, mediate such temporal experiences? Chronometres: Devotional Literature, Duration, and Victorian Reading Culture is a study of the time-inflected reading practices of religious literature, the single largest market for print in Victorian Britain. It examines poetic cycles by John Keble, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and Frances Ridley Havergal; family prayer manuals, Sunday-reading books and periodicals; and devotional gift books and daily textbooks. Designed for diurnal and weekly reading, chronometrical literature tuned its readers' attentions to the idea of eternity and the everlasting peace of spiritual transcendence, but only in so far as it parcelled out reading into discrete increments that resembled the new industrial time-scales of factories and railway schedules. Chronometres thus takes up print culture, affect theory, and the religious turn in literary studies in order to explore the intersections between devotional practice and the condition of modernity. It argues that what defines Victorian devotional literature is the experience of its time signatures, those structures of feeling associated with its reading durations. For many Victorians, reading devotionally increasingly meant reading in regular portions and often according to the calendar and work-day in contrast to the liturgical year. Keeping pace with the temporal measures of modernity, devotion became a routinized practice: a way of synchronizing the interior life of spirit with the exigencies of clock time. Chronometres considers how the deliverances afforded through time-scaled reading are persistently materialised in the body, both that of the book and of the reader. Recognizing that literature and devotion are not timeless abstractions, it asks how the materiality of books, conceived as horological relationships through reading, might bring about the felt experience of time. Even as Victorian devotion invites us to tarry over the page, it also prompts the question: what if it is 'eternity' that keeps time with the clock?

This is not a conventional book. It is designed to stimulate and challenge all people who are curious to find out about the world they inhabit and their place within it. It does this by suggesting questions and lines of questioning on a wide range of topics. The book does not provide answers or model arguments but prompts people to create their own questions and a reading log or journal. To this end, almost all questions have a list of books or articles to provide a starter for stimulating further reading. Once you start, you will be hooked! Never stop questioning.

Common sense tells us that technology can either be a blessing or curse in our lives. The assertion flows easily but deceptively from us. Beneath the flowing assertion, lay many cross currents and much complexity. These complexities are named and laid out for individual and group exploration throughout the book. They provide mirrors for the reader and groups of readers to discover their own affirmations and arguments with their own digital profiles based on Jewish/humanistic religious values. The iterative analysis points back to the double-entendre in the book’s title, "text me" can be a command to engage in the famously quick communication as in receiving a text on our smart phones and "text me" can also serve as an imperative to explore the wisdom contained in Jewish texts. The synergies, gaps, creative tensions, and paradoxes living within this double use of “text me” permeate the volume. Though rooted in Jewish sources the tools of analysis can be used by Christians, Muslims, and people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Indeed, the book is an invitation to all who live in the digital age which is to say all of us. Commentaries provided by scholars of all three of the western, monotheistic faiths highlight this universal dimension.