Stacked Eyes
For some odd reason, when cell phone photography became common, people began recording and viewing images while holding their phones upright, taking and sharing shots that are tall and narrow. This suggests to me that we are fundamentally inattentive to even the simplest observable features of the world we live in. For instance, that Nature or some Creator put our eyes side by side, not one on top of the other. Why on earth would you want to capture and view images as if our eyes were vertically oriented? Maybe because we’ve concluded that our gadgets are already so smart that we don’t even have to think anymore.
Bounded by gravity, we live our lives going side to side, with most events that we perceive occurring on the horizontal plane. We don’t really do too much ascending and descending, and what little of life that we think happens going up and down occurs at the end of our days on some vertical spiritual y-axis.
The problem with looking at the world through a vertical slot is that it limits our perception of most of the things going on to the left and right of where we are, of what we’re looking at. Many of those things on our own plane are incredibly important—and yet entirely out of view and beyond our digital field of perception. Yet we seem increasingly to base our judgments and choices on what little we see through the limited upright aperture.
In the narrow view, we see an election campaign waged between two doddering old fools, neither of whom appears to be substantially in touch with reality. They, too, may only be capable of lifting and lowering their own gazes, blissfully unaware of what’s going on around them. Incredibly, they have dedicated backers and supporters who rely on their respective hero’s interpretations of the narrow view as if they were complete descriptions of reality.
Somewhere in our ancestry long ago, binocular vision evolved to help us eat and avoid being eaten, to survive and thrive. This vision evolved and gave us the horizontal perception of distance as we went through the world on that plane. If evolution were better at keeping up with our faddish preferences, our eyes would very soon be positioned vertically, stacked one above the other, to ease the strain on our eyes of cell phone imagery. And at least some of us would no longer have to worry about what we might be missing.
One more reason why I do not own one of those things.
I have a digital camera. I can take photos in portrait or landscape orientation, depending on the subject and what will make for the best composition. And it's got a good zoom. (Also other bells and whistles I haven't even tried.)
Cell phone video is not ideal but so much more convenient than a camcorder. I do use the video option on my camera and the screen is much wider (what is the term I'm searching for, wide angle?) and more pleasant to view. Speaking of videos, I complained about the excessive plowing in my town. Watch this and see if it would DRIVE YOU CRAZY. We had another small snow event the next day and my girlfriend told me she heard the plow go past her home three times too. And it was all gone within hours due to Mother Nature warming things up. https://youtu.be/3Yu2S1FQZMI?si=8VmzCB6aNdiPsW12