Wired Myopia
Remember those pretentious pixellated portraits from the Digerati book? I measured them. They are 25x40 greyscale pixmaps, where each square is about 0.5cm square.
It's difficult for me to make any sense of them looking at them closely; I can sort of make out eyes and mouths and noses, but I don't get any sense of what the Digeratus in question looks like. That is, until I take off my glasses and hold the book at arm's length. My horrible shortsighted eyes apply a gaussian blur to the pixels, and it becomes much easier for me to make out facial features. If I keep my glasses on, the pictures are more understandable but still jaggy -- so something about my bad eyesight (probably combined with brain tricks) is actually helping me out.
I still think that the pictures are pretentious, and although I can see some metaphor about taking a "long view", I still think clear portraits would have been more useful (and the dust jacket features the author photo in perfectly clear high-res, interestingly). But this may be the first time in my life where my myopia worked to my advantage. That's kind of neat, even though the context is not so useful.
Livejournal URL: http://pnijjar.livejournal.com/10909.html
Mood: myopic