Zoomability

We are always on the lookout for subtle but important shifts in values. These values are often the filters consumers use to understand the world, and the framework of expectations they ultimately impose on it.

Discussion of a new value, which I would call "zoomability" has emerged recently, and was touched on recently by author Steven Johnson in an article for the  New York Times Magazine. 

In his article, "The Long Zoom," a play on Brian Eno and Stewart Brand's concept of the Long Now, Johnson makes the point that cultures have a way of seeing that defines them, and gives the examples of fixed perspective as a defining value of the Rennaisance, or music video's quick cuts defining how we have seen popular culture in the West for the past 20 years, thanks to MTV. A new paradigm may now be emerging, he writes, around the aesthetic of zoom, being able to drill down from a macro level (typically visually), to very small or local detail.  His illustrations for this are the phenomena of Google Earth, and the coming video game from Will Wright, the creator of the Sims, called Spore, which allows the gamer to begin a single-celled organism, and work to evolve into a creature that ultimately acts at the intergalactic level. Zoom indeed.

My elementary-age children already take zoomability for granted, having experienced Google Earth early in their lives, and having the concept of hyperlinks among bits of information already embedded in their heads. They assume they can move mentally from the global to the local with ease, whereas my generation had to make the physical connections between levels of information and experience manually. This is a shift in the filters we talk about, the mental models we use.

Where will zoomability take us next? The first stop is in our access to information, and this is already happening with the evolution of the semantic Web. Device interfaces and architecture may not be far behind. What happens when we start to apply easily understood and navigated connections between global and local to areas such as politics, the environment, and economics, we can probably already guess at--amplification of local concerns to a global level and increased interest in sustainability are among the possible outcomes.

Watch out for where the linkages are made, and the new processes that emerge to enable zoomability--this may be the next barrier we jump in the way we not only see, but live.