As subtitles go, the one Laurence Scott chose for his new book, “Picnic Comma Lightning,” is certainly on the ambitious side: “The Experience of Reality in the Twenty-First Century.” Scott’s hard-to-categorize, essayistic investigation of reality and technology is literary, cultural and deeply personal. The literary side is reflected in his title, which is taken from Humbert Humbert’s terse description of the cause of his mother’s death in “Lolita”: “(picnic, lightning).” The personal involves the deaths of Scott’s own parents: his mother in 2010, when he was 30, and his father in 2012. Scott is interested in the ways social media and other technologies change our understanding of what is public and private. It’s a capacious book, moving freely from Walter Benjamin to the TV soap “Dynasty”; from the “metaphysics” of Marie Kondo to Heidegger’s consideration of the question “What is a thing?” Below, Scott talks about Brexit, influencers, how our feelings have become big business and more.

When did you first get the idea to write this book?

In 2015, I’d just written “The Four-Dimensional Human.” In that book, I was trying to explore the new pleasures, anxieties and etiquette of inhabiting the fourth dimension: the internet and social media. I wanted to broaden that and look at how technologies blur the boundary between our private and public lives in new ways.

As I write in the book, my parents died in “impolite succession.” What I noticed when I thought about digital life was that death really calls into question what a real person is. The dead often feel very present and real to us. I wanted to see if the experience of personal bereavement could help illuminate larger cultural shifts in our sense of reality and the reality of other people.

I didn’t want to write a book that gives a plan for living happily in the digital age. I have almost no suggestions for that. I just wanted to communicate how this new world feels to me, and hopefully readers would recognize some of those feelings in themselves: I find this weird; do you find this weird?