成人快手

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 third episode, in an age when - thanks to smartphones - we are all photographers, how does our view of the past change? As Laurence Scott says, "To say that we live in an age of surveillance is an observation that manages to be both banal and urgent. We understand, with paralysed resignation, that we're being watched in all sorts of ways. We startle each other with new examples of eavesdropping, of hijacked webcams, of idling smart- phones butting in on face-to-face conversations, supplying ads related to our pillow-talk. And yet most of us are only startled to a point. References to 1984 are now so common that Big Brother is both a clich茅d metaphor and a useful shorthand for the status quo.

"Although our eyes and expectations are adjusting to the glare of the various cameras trained on our daily movements, our role behind the camera's lens is less remarked upon..."

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 成人快手.

Read by Stephen Mangan
Adapted by Elizabeth Burke
Produced by Alexandra Quinn
A Loftus production for 成人快手 Radio 4.