SCREENS - Another Potential Issue-Theme

More and more of our everyday lives are held to a web of communications whose only articulation with the physical world is a two-dimensional field—a screen. Think of how often you encounter screens in your day-to-day life and how many messages are held to this web of articulations. And with the advent of the internet we now have screens within screens—literally, not in the “frame within frames” sense (although that principle is applicable here). But what is it about the screen and the square that lends them to universal application when it comes to displaying information?

Such fields are indeed universal. That might not seem very interesting until you think about what kind of impact such prevalence has on one’s mode of thinking. When you’re constantly faced with that interface you’re bound to think on that coordinate plane, in terms of two dimensions.

Futurist Buckminster Fuller often said that the keys to identifying, understanding and solving local problems requires the application of universal knowledge. However to really insert yourself into that appreciation you need only to begin thinking not in terms of up and down (as in the temporal, flat world, what-you-perceive reality), but in terms of in and out (as in being in the acknowledgement of macro systems and micro systems and the structures that bind the two together). A need to break this mode of thinking has been illustrated in cubism and its attempts to show all sides of an object at once. And Mr. Fuller himself created a “geo scope” of the earth—a map layout that showed all landmasses of the earth without distortion.

So if we do begin to think in terms of in and out, will we be opened to any better means of promoting holistic modes of thinking? Hypothetically, what are the differences between a world experienced in two dimensions as opposed to one experienced in three dimensions?