During the preparation of this column I read a review of a new book - The Four Dimensional Human by Laurence Scott. The review Society, mediated, by Carol Tavris in the Times Literary Supplement, convinced me that this is a book I look forward to reading. Tavris writes that through reporting on his own experience in the early years of the cell phone and text messages Scott shows us how those first tastes of bringing the physically distant into our immediate vicinity expanded our understanding of what comprises our "real" surroundings. She quotes Scott:

Those first years of the new millennium could be remembered as a period when we began to see rents in our habits, to feel tears in the fabric of everyday life that revealed a new sort of world behind them. As the walls of La Cave cracked and cleaved around my questing mobile, our small party was being exposed to and remarking on a normalcy of the near-future. My puncturing of our sociability, the bleeding away of presence, was judged an injury to the ambience. For they'd caught me shimmering between two places, living simultaneously in the 3D world of tablecloths and elbows, and also in another dimension, a lively, unrealisable kind of nowhere, which couldn't adequately be thought about in the regular terms of width, depth and breadth.