Engineering for the Fourth Dimension

From The New Yorker - - Apple at 40:

"When Jobs said, in 1990, that the personal computer was like “a bicycle for the mind,” he meant that it might help us think. One of the odd twists in the Apple story is that the company’s most successful computer, the iPhone, has turned out to be a bicycle for the mind in a different way: it helps us glide quickly away from wherever we are into some other mental space. In a recent book called “The Four-Dimensional Human,” the literary scholar Laurence Scott situates today’s smartphone moment within a larger history stretching back to the Edwardian era, when radio was invented. Scott points out that, around that time, writers began to imagine a future when human beings would live not just in the here and now but also, simultaneously, on some other, more abstract plane. (He quotes a description of this “fourth dimension” from Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s 1901 novel “The Inheritors”: “One seemed to see something beyond, something vaster—vaster than the cathedrals . . . an unrealised, unrealisable infinity of space.”) The smartphone, through its constant connectivity, has made this vision a reality. We’re all where we are—and also, at the same time, somewhere else. Many of us have been four-dimensional beings only since 2007, when the first iPhone arrived. We don’t know how to think about our new condition just yet."