“You know that expression, ‘I recognize your face, but the name escapes me’ we use when we meet someone from our deep past? Well, now we have a new problem. With everyone walking around wearing surgical masks, we might not even have a face to name. What’s a brain with a fading memory to do? What’s going to come out of the mouth? ‘I’m sorry, I recognize your body, but I can’t recall either your name or your face.’”
“Oh! Things aren’t that bad.”
“No, they are. And the only way we’ll see faces is on some electronic device. We’ll continue to see people on venues like FaceTime and SnapChat, but we’ll lack that three-dimensionality we were so used to. Holy cow! I just realized it. We’ve all become Flatlanders, as in Edwin A. Abbott’s nineteenth-century novel Flatland. All the people we know are going to be two-dimensional images on our smart phones, tablets, and computer screens.”
“I see what you mean. Hadn’t thought of that. Guess we are becoming somewhat two-dimensional nowadays. But it isn’t as though we hadn’t been preparing for this day. For years we’ve been walking around next to three-dimensional beings while we paid increasing attention to our two-dimensional world of images and texts on smart devices. I think this is the culmination, the way we finally become one with the screen. It’s Zen. From the time of Homo erectus, now known to be two million years ago, through all those other hominins, this, apparently, is what we’ve been evolving toward. We’ve been extricating ourselves from that third dimension, that one we call depth. Talk about ‘shallow people’; that’s what we’ve become, and we started the process even before a pandemic forced us into screen relationships. Somebody’s got to do something like invent an affordable three-dimensional iPad so that we can reclaim what we once were—less the actual touching, of course. Otherwise, we’re headed into Flatland.”
“And that can’t be good news.”
“Oh! Things aren’t that bad.”
“No, they are. And the only way we’ll see faces is on some electronic device. We’ll continue to see people on venues like FaceTime and SnapChat, but we’ll lack that three-dimensionality we were so used to. Holy cow! I just realized it. We’ve all become Flatlanders, as in Edwin A. Abbott’s nineteenth-century novel Flatland. All the people we know are going to be two-dimensional images on our smart phones, tablets, and computer screens.”
“I see what you mean. Hadn’t thought of that. Guess we are becoming somewhat two-dimensional nowadays. But it isn’t as though we hadn’t been preparing for this day. For years we’ve been walking around next to three-dimensional beings while we paid increasing attention to our two-dimensional world of images and texts on smart devices. I think this is the culmination, the way we finally become one with the screen. It’s Zen. From the time of Homo erectus, now known to be two million years ago, through all those other hominins, this, apparently, is what we’ve been evolving toward. We’ve been extricating ourselves from that third dimension, that one we call depth. Talk about ‘shallow people’; that’s what we’ve become, and we started the process even before a pandemic forced us into screen relationships. Somebody’s got to do something like invent an affordable three-dimensional iPad so that we can reclaim what we once were—less the actual touching, of course. Otherwise, we’re headed into Flatland.”
“And that can’t be good news.”
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