Of course it's an excuse. Nothing, other than various pressing work-related tasks, is really keeping me from finishing the book. But there is another reason, and it's of the positive sort. It turns out that it's the sort of book where I find something worth quoting on almost every page. In the introduction, for instance, Scott writes (p. 11):
The fourth dimension doesn’t sit neatly above or on the other side of things. It isn’t an attic extension. Rather, it contorts the old dimensions. And so it is with digitisation, which is no longer a space in and out of which we clamber, via the phone lines. The old world itself has taken on, in its essence, a four-dimensionality. Every moment, every object, has been imbued with the capacity for this extra aspect.It's too good a description not to quote. The idea of contorting, of creating a bend in space/time, rather that adding another level, seems to me to be a wonderful description. Rather than offering something "new" - an overly used expression that hardly really tells us anything, Scott tells us that what's different isn't the reality, but our perception of it. And on top of that, he tells us that it isn't an attic ... which of course can be viewed as a refuting of this project, although despite its name, I doubt that the Boidem ever really functioned as its namesake would suggest.