It is a philosophical meditation on perceptions of reality, achieved by means of beguilingly playful moves from confession to anthropology to social analysis. It is also an elegy for two lost parents ... Scott holds these strands in delicate, elusive dialogue ... Though his book is often as free-wheelingly convivial as a conversation in a bar, Scott watches his own arguments to see how they might hold up through a night’s vigil in intensive care ... I suspect Scott of having spent many nights reading John Donne. Certainly he feels with acuity the shaping power of a metaphorical conceit ... In the tradition of Barthes’s mythographies of everyday life, Scott makes banal things shimmer with meaning ... He operates on a dauntingly large conceptual scale, but there’s a sense of embrace in his cleverness. It’s not often that a highly ambitious work of social analysis speaks so determinedly to the heart.

Scott’s mode of argument is freewheeling and associative ... His tone is that of a digital insider, watchful and unblinkered but never a Jeremiah. Picnic Comma Lightning is, in fact, scrupulous almost to a fault. Sometimes Scott worries away for too long at an idea, and his range of reference, from Winnie the Pooh to Jacques Lacan, can be dizzying. But his project—to carve out a more reflective space, a 'poeticized reality,' in this four-dimensional world—feels admirable and necessary. In an era of anti-nuance, such meticulousness is a tonic.

If you’ve ever read the quicksilver French cultural theorist Roland Barthes on the Citroën DS, or Greta Garbo’s face, you’ll have an idea of how Scott works. Like Barthes, he is always surprising ... you feel Scott’s fascinated unease. [A] smoky mood runs through the book ... Scott is very, very good at metaphors. He also has a formidably wide range of cultural reference ... Less successful are the fragments of memoir that are intercut into the cultural commentary ... It is all thoughtfully, movingly done, yet the two parts of the book feel cleverly stitched rather than grown together ... This is a fine, nuanced, sometimes scintillating book, then, but the balance is not quite right.

With its references to TV and film as well as Lacan and Barthes, the voice is rather like that of a domesticated, smoothed-over Slavoj Žižek ... Not everyone will enjoy its style. There are tics here of an academy-tuned prose that self-importantly announces its concerns...introduces subjects by way of obviously false dichotomies...and faux-hesitantly employs modal verbs to proffer very obvious ideas ... Scott predicts a future that he seems to be unaware already exists ... Some of his subjects seem already analyzed to exhaustion by others, even as they have not actually attained reality yet ... One has the feeling that the author has not long been immersed in these topics, a suspicion unallayed by the apparently slender research on display ... And Scott echoes the glib nonsense of the worst pop-science writers ... On the other hand there is throughout the book a sincere wish to make beautiful sentences and surprising images out of quotidian experience, which can often pay off ... The book lights up, indeed, whenever Scott veers off the beaten track of familiar snark about social media or Fitbit users and the like ... Where the book is most interesting is as a literary close reading of modern culture, and its best chapter swaggeringly demonstrates that everyone is now, perforce, a literary critic ... The general smartphone-using population, the author details brilliantly, is getting a crash course of immersive training in textual ambiguity, the critique of bad metaphors, and the operations of bathos and metonymy.

The author moves from one subject to another with sometimes-neck-snapping speed, populating his pages with names and events that in many instances will be ephemeral in a few years (Britney Spears, Cosmo Kramer) but with others that are eternal (W.H. Auden, Aeschylus, Doris Lessing). Scott ably deconstructs how shared realities are forged, all of which involve the skillful, meaningful storytelling of which he himself is an ascended master. As he moves from the nature of story, love, memory, and other such things that enfold us while embracing and being embraced by 'the weird scale of the private life of the mind,' the author makes it clear that reality is not always a pleasant place to be, for framing this eminently literary story and running through it are memories of his mother as she dies, too young, of cancer. A lucid, if refractory and quite brilliant, critique of a fragmented culture in a peculiar time.

A chapter on symbolism and metaphor in tech is particularly clever ... Scott’s acutely perceptive book delivers a thoughtful message about finding an authentic way to live at a time when reality itself can seem built on shifting sands.