Orthographic media

Working on var­ious projects over the years, I’ve often had reason to tinker with 3D graphics ren­dered using an ortho­graphic pro­jec­tion.

Most first-person 3D games use a per­spec­tive pro­jec­tion, which appears gen­er­ally “realistic”: objects shrink as they become more dis­tant. When vir­tual scenes are ren­dered this way, we (as humans, with eyeballs) can use our visual intu­itions to judge the scale and arrange­ment of objects within them. That’s the case even when a scene is very abstract, like this one:

I could point to any two cubes in the scene above, ask “which one is closer?” and you’d be able to tell me, instantly and confidently.

There’s another kind of pro­jec­tion, called ortho­graphic, often used in 3D appli­ca­tions where you want the view to be dia­gram­matic rather than dramatic. (It’s very common in strategy games.) In this pro­jec­tion, objects appear the same size regard­less of their dis­tance from the camera. Here’s that same scene — it’s lit­er­ally the same data structure — ren­dered ortho­graphically:

I could point to any two cubes in the scene above, ask “which one is closer?” and you’d have to pause to figure it out. It’s not impossible; some­times one cube occludes another, a clear giveaway. But the point is, it takes effort, and, very often, your guess is wrong. (Trust me, as a person who has strug­gled to debug a video game ren­dered this way!)

Why do I bring this up?

Browsing Twitter the other day, I once again found myself sucked into a far-off event that truly does not matter, and it occurred to me that social media is an ortho­graphic camera.

Imagine those col­orful cubes in the ortho­graphic pro­jec­tion above as tweets: all the same size, taking up the same amount of space on the canvas, even though some are way off in the dis­tance while others brush the vir­tual camera’s lens. Maybe this is a flavor of context collapse: the stan­dard­iza­tion of all events, no matter how big or small, delightful or traumatic, to fit the same mashed-together timeline.

Before elec­tronic media, news was atten­u­ated by the fric­tion and delay of trans­mis­sion and reproduction. When it arrived on your doorstep, a report of a far-off event had an “amplitude” that helped you judge whether or not it mat­tered to you and/or the world.

That’s not the case with social media, where even tiny, dis­tant events are repro­duced “at full size” on your screen. This has been true of elec­tronic media for a long time — I’m thinking of all the local TV news broad­casts that have opened with the day’s gris­liest murder — but/and there was, before social media, at least an argu­ment that it was impor­tant to have good “news judgment” if you were respon­sible for putting events on screens, par­tic­u­larly at the highest levels.

Indeed, working out the rel­a­tive impor­tance of events was, and is, a big part of what news­rooms do. The front page of a print news­paper was, and is, the tan­gible result: its allo­ca­tion of paper and ink to dif­ferent sto­ries a direct and costly indi­ca­tion of their rel­a­tive weight.

Two thoughts, then.

First, what would it look like for a social media plat­form to re-establish per­spec­tive? To atten­uate the strength of sig­nals over dis­tance — not geo­graphic dis­tance, necessarily, but other kinds? (This is obvi­ously related to my broad interest in adding more neg­a­tive feedback to these plat­forms.)

Second, in the absence of any such attenuation, I think a prac­tical and healthy thing that any user of social media can do when con­fronted with a free-floating cube of news is ask: how big is this, really? Does it matter to me and my community? Does it, in fact, matter anywhere except the par­tic­ular place it happened? Sometimes, the answer is absolutely yes, but not always — and these plat­form don’t make it easy to judge.

P.S. Note that ortho­graphic pro­jec­tion has its uses — and can be very beautiful!

August 2020, Berkeley