I have a Big Question to ask, but no answers. I’m just thinking through my keyboard.
Consider, for the sake of argument, Instagram — not to heap blame on Meta, but as a starting point. Instagram privileges, by visual design, not square photos but portrait-format images. On an individual’s feed, anything not taller than wide is cropped arbitrarily. That change, made a year or so ago, annoyed a lot of people, but it’s a local consequence, if not an inevitable one, of the smart phone as viewing device: you’re working within a portrait-format medium.
Imagine you’re scrolling vertically through images on a vertically oriented device. The images you will see for the longest duration, which therefore will make the greatest visual impression on you, will get the most attention, and will therefore be served algorithmically most often to others, are those that take up the most physical space on the vertical screen — that is, those in portrait format.
But again: it’s not the algorithm. It’s the medium. The algorithm makes the problem worse, but it starts with the fact that the phone is a vertical device.
This is a fairly radical change from the way the world was presented in 20th-century media, especially in film: in a horizontal orientation that showed context within a room or across a landscape. And those media, importantly, reflected the way (I think) normal human beings take in their surroundings. If you’re walking around you see what’s in front of you, and you also scan left to right; not so often up or down, I think, unless the ground is uneven or a bird is singing in the trees. We don’t naturally move up and down, but across horizontal surfaces; our vision unconsciously reflects that.
My question is, how, and to what extent, does the privileging of portrait-format images change the way we actually see the world?
Do you suppose this is a silly question? How much time do people spend looking at their phones even while they’re walking around? How much do they photograph their surroundings rather than simply observing? How much of that photography is taken with social media in mind?
Portrait format seems to me to reflect a kind of tunnel vision. No peripheral vision, no context: only what’s right in front of you. Tunnel vision is a pretty good metaphor for an awful lot of what passes for “discourse” these days: straight to the point, no context. It’s all about me and where I’m going. But tunnel vision also encourages paranoia: if you can’t see what’s around you, you’re constantly afraid.
And is it only a metaphor? I’m reading Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things this winter, and I don’t believe he would think so: the part of the brain responsible for peripheral vision is in fact the part responsible for global thinking. It’s a natural biological adaptation. And it stands to reason, I think, that if you train your literal peripheral vision — or let it atrophy — you will train or let atrophy your metaphorical peripheral vision. You will become narrow.
Again, I’m just thinking through my keyboard. Maybe I’m wrong. But I lean towards not.
Two final notes, which might be caveats but probably aren’t:
- It occurs to me as I’m writing this that walking down a street in a large city limits what there is to see from left to right and encourages looking up. So, to some degree, does driving a car. But I don’t think that counters my point; in fact it strengthens it: phone-vision could just be a refinement of a change already resulting from city life.
- I started down this track because I am expected to have an Instagram account for my business, and most of what I have to display — framed carvings — are wider than tall. In fact I’ve taken to radically elongated formats, e.g. 6×15, and also to large sizes, precisely because they allow for visual context. And of course Instagram does a lousy job of displaying them, and nobody sees them. So this morning I went through the b.s. ritual of posting a photo to keep the account looking active, and my annoyance led me into all this cultural theory crap. I still don’t think I’m wrong.