The reality of life inside the fake online bubble
Picnic Comma Lightning Laurence Scott William Heinemann €27.05 ★★★★★
In an age when our most intimate emotions are exposed online via dating sites, Twitter spats and Insta stories, what happens when something soul-shaking happens in real life? That’s the question Laurence Scott sets out to answer in this clever, funny and deeply moving book. Eight years ago, when Scott had just turned 30, his mother died of cancer, followed quickly by his father. Where was the Facebook emoticon that could come close to capturing the mixture of loss, shock and relief that Scott felt?
This makes Picnic Comma Lightning sound like yet another grief memoir, whereas it’s actually an engaging and thought-provoking journey through the fakery of modern life. Scott takes in everything from Roland Barthes to Dynasty (Joan Collins, right) and from Polaroid cameras to Fitbits.
Although Scott’s reading is wide, his own experiences remain down to earth. He does a great job of going back over his Eighties’ childhood and showing how so much of it wouldn’t make sense to the new generation of digital natives. What about the weird moment that anyone over 35 will remember of bumping into your teacher in the park or the shops and realising that she didn’t actually live permanently inside her classroom? Scott says today’s kids wouldn’t find that embarrassing. Thanks to seeing so many blooper reels on their favourite streamed TV shows, they accept that the same person can exist in two different realms at the same time.
Even Nigella Lawson, apparently, now ends her programmes with outtakes of her fluffing her lines, an acknowledgment that the Domestic Goddess is a ‘real’ person as well as a made-up one. To prove the point, Scott cites the fact that if TV actors live-tweet during the transmission of their show, the viewing figures soar. One of EastEnders’ most successful episodes ever, in which Barbara Windsor made her last appearance, involved the actors Ross Kemp and Adam Woodyatt exchanging messages with fans. All this might seem interesting but harmless, until Scott deftly points out how living in two realms damages our ability to live properly in either. He cites the case of a dog-walking service that promises to supply video and GPS evidence that the pooch was taken for a good stretch. Rather than ‘proving’ reality, Scott argues that this shows a world terrifyingly devoid of trust. Digital panic isn’t new, but Scott writes such entrancing prose that reading his book is like waking up from a nightmare and realising, in a panicky split-second, that you’re not sure if something bad has actually happened in your real life or just in the parallel one that gets live-streamed inside your own head.