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The Long Zoom
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The Long Zoom is a framework for seeing the world, whereby zooming in and out you get a unique perspective of things. Steven Berlin Johnson coined the phrase in an October, 2006 New York Times Magazine article, and the concept was popularized by the Charles and Ray Eames' film Powers of Ten and is now best known in applications like Google Maps. Though The Long Zoom name is a recent moniker, the question can be asked, how long has the idea been around? In a December, 2007 Nature editorial we read: Technology can change the way we see the world. If the artist David Hockney is to be believed, the camera obscura changed the way artists drew things, and thus how their audiences saw them. Centuries later, photographic film changed the visual arts again, as painters sought to recapture subjectivity in fresh impressionisms and expressionisms in response to the new technology. Then cine-matography brought with it a new mastery over time. Compressed, it turned buds to blooms in seconds — reversed, it re-erected falling chimneys with pleasing symbolic power. These tricks became embedded in our minds, letting us think of time moving backwards and forwards, faster and slower with an educated ease previously absent from the imagination. In the past two decades, the computer has changed things yet again, introducing an almost infinite capacity to bring what was previously non-visual to the eye, and an almost infinite range of points of view impossible to reach in any other way. The ability to change point-of-view and depth-of-field massively and arbitrarily has created a peculiarly contemporary way of seeing, which American technology writer Steven Johnson has called "the long zoom". This is when a camera focused on, say, a human eye appears to hurtle pell-mell through the pupil to the nucleus of a cell — or pulls back from the orbit of the eye to an orbit round the planet. Did computers and technology create this "contemporary way of seeing?" Was it possible to think of things from this perspective before the zoom lens? Did the lens itself change the human paradigm from static to zoom? And if the lens, can this go all the way back to Galileo and Leeuwenhoek? Examples Essays * Cosmic View Books * The Structure of Scientific Revolutions * The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy * Consilience * The Ghost Map * Guns, Germs, and Steel * The Perfect Storm * Film * Powers of Ten * Cosmic Zoom * Cosmic Voyage * Up Series Television * The Day the Universe Changed * Connections * Lost * The Wire Photography * Gigapixel image Games * Spore Software * Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth * Seadragon * Google Maps * DeepZoom Psychology * Tree of Knowledge System History * Longue durée * Big History Religion Education See Also
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