Interactive Environmental Journalism

The Long Zoom

A good story in The New York Times Sunday magazine today called "The Long Zoom" described a new game that Will Wright (creator of Sims, among other games) is working on called Spore. It allows users to create an entire universe, building through six different spatial scales: cell, creature, tribe, city, civilization, and space.

The game allows users to understand how dynamics change depending on the scale of the system they are creating. As we work to conceive of journalism as something created at the tribe or city level (to use Spore scale) rather than solely on the scale of creatures, this different perspective may enable us to see new ways to combine and change old practices.

The author of the story (Steven Johnson) begins by describing how each age has distinct "ways of seeing." He writes:

Most eras have distinct “ways of seeing” that end up defining the period in retrospect: the fixed perspective of Renaissance art, the scattered collages of Cubism, the rapid-fire cuts introduced by MTV and the channel-surfing of the 80’s. Our own defining view is what you might call the long zoom: the satellites tracking in on license-plate numbers in the spy movies; the Google maps in which a few clicks take you from a view of an entire region to the roof of your house; the opening shot in “Fight Club” that pulls out from Edward Norton’s synapses all the way to his quivering face as he stares into the muzzle of a revolver; the fractal geometry of chaos theory in which each new scale reveals endless complexity. And this is not just a way of seeing but also a way of thinking: moving conceptually from the scale of DNA to the scale of personality all the way up to social movements and politics — and back again.

We're trying to figure out what "the long zoom" looks like for journalism, for Lake Tahoe, for our own projects. I think it's a powerful "way of seeing" that has great potential for innovation...and in the meantime, we can experience what it means to live in "endless complexity."

posted by donica @ 10:36 PM