Ink

Transcribed below. The typewriter is a 1965 Smith-Corona Sterling with Elite type.

Are We Becoming Our Devices?

The other day Dr. Boli was looking at some renderings of new buildings architects propose to erect in his neighborhood. It is always a good idea to keep track of what architects propose to put up around us, so that we will know when it may be necessary to lie in front of a bulldozer.

What Dr. Boli noticed in these renderings of buildings that do not yet exist was something he has noticed several times before, but this time it set a train of thought in motion that did not stop moving until it wrecked in a head-on collision with another train of thought.

These pictures of imaginary buildings were made with the help of a computer, and in order to make them seem more real to the clients, the architect had simulated the faulty perspective common in cell-phone pictures of buildings. The side walls leaned in toward each other. The buildings would not be put up that way, of course, but the architect had drawn them that way (or rather had instructed the computer to draw them that way) in order to simulate the way the building would look in real life.

This implies an interesting assumption about what “real life” is.

If you stand on a city sidewalk and look at the buildings, their walls do not appear to be leaning in toward each other. Unless they are unusual buildings, they have walls that go straight up and down, and those walls look like walls that go straight up and down.

That is how the world looks to our unmediated eyes. But more and more frequently Dr. Boli runs across people who do not believe that the world looks that way. Not too long ago he had a conversation about perspective with two younger acquaintances—people who had grown up in the era of ubiquitous phone cameras. They insisted that the false perspective was true: that we do naturally see walls as leaning toward each other, as they do in a photograph when the camera is pointed slightly upward. So, since the conversation took place on a city sidewalk, Dr. Boli asked these two young people to point to a straight wall that appeared to be leaning. They were shocked to discover that they could not find any.

How, then, have we come to this point in the development of our species? How is it that things look more real to us, or at least to a great many of us, if they look the way they look to our devices, not the way they look to our eyes?

Here it might be useful to ask why we do not perceive the world the way our camera lenses perceive it. Dr. Boli is not an expert in the science of vision, but he feels confident in saying that it has to do with the clever way our brains fool us into thinking we have a better picture of the world than we really have. As for the rest, better-informed readers may freely correct us in the comments.

When you point a camera lens at the side of a building, assuming you do not tilt the camera sideways, the vertical line directly in the center of the frame will be straight up and down. But if you point the camera slightly upward, as you often will to take in the whole building, that line is the only vertical line that will be straight up and down. Other verticals will converge, so that the side walls seem to lean in toward each other.

Our eyes, however, do not see that whole view at once. We really see only a very small part of the world at any one time. A little spot in front of us is clear; the rest of our field of vision is all blur. But we do not perceive the blur, because as soon as we think of an object in that blur zone, our eyes move, and that object is now the sharp center of our field of vision.

When we take in a scene, like a street full of buildings, we are actually making a composite of a large number of those very small sharp images. When we look at the middle of a building, it is straight up and down, just as it would be if it were in the middle of a photograph. When we think about one of the side walls, our eyes move to take it in, and immediately it is in the center of our vision—and therefore it is straight up and down, just as it would be in the center of a photograph. All the parts of our composite image have vertical lines that are truly vertical.

This is why no artist ever thought of drawing buildings with the sides caving in before the age of photography, and why manuals for beginning photographers listed incorrect perspective as one of the most elementary blunders. For the first 150 years of the camera, it was understood that the way human eyes see should be the way the camera sees.

Now, however, it seems that the way the camera sees—the way Dr. Boli still labels, anachronistically perhaps, “incorrect per- spective”—is more real-looking to a large part of the population than the way the eye sees. What does that indicate about the state of human culture?

It seems to imply that we do not perceive the world through our eyes anymore. We perceive it through our devices. When you hear pundits speculating on what the world will be like when we are all sunk deep in virtual reality, you may smugly assert that we are already there. Our bodies exist in the material world, out we do not see it unless it appears on the little rectangular screen in front of our faces. We judge the real by whether it matches the virtual; if it does not, it is not real enough for us.

Dr. Boli talked earlier about why he thought “mobile first” was a bad idea in Web design. But perhaps we ought to take it as a larger principle. Anyone wishing to communicate with the population of our twenty-first century should take a mobile-first approach to reality. We cannot assume that our audience has direct experience of the most elementary facts of nature. If the real world stubbornly behaves in a different way from the way the world behaves on our phone screens, then it is the real world that requires explanation and even justification.

The alternative is not to worry too much about communicating with the population of the twenty-first century. That is the course Dr. Boli has chosen, and it has its advantages.