Flatland, Old and New.

In 1884, the publication of a novella entitled Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin A. Abbot accomplished two things: it critiqued the elitist Victorian society in which he lived and awakened the popular imagination to the possibilities of life in spaces of higher dimensions, such as 4-dimensional universes.

This was accomplished by a clever comparison and explanation of our natural 3-dimensional world with and to "Flatland" and "Flatlanders", who, existing only as flat smudges, as points, lines or squares on a sheet of paper, could neither easily grasp nor experience the things that themselves physically move or emotionally move us in our richer world with its extra, 3rd dimension.

Modern Hong Kong, and, indeed, much of the contemporary industrialized world, is essentially much like his fictional Flatland as Abbot described it then. One-hundred and twenty-six years later we find ourselves living in a New Flatland - a screen-based flat world, whose denizens are increasingly surrendering their daily world, experience and lives to 2-dimensional, audio-visual-only experiences, digitized flat substitutes for the natural, rich 3-dimensional, real-world. Missing are their 3D counterparts vibrant with smells, textures, living sounds and sights, heat, cold and myriad other sensations, feelings and perceptions enjoyed by their grandparents, great-grand parents and of virtually all of humanity in most recorded and unrecorded history.

As the depths and heights of life's experiences get squashed and flattened onto an HDTV, movie, computer, digital camera or cell phone screen, for all too many of us, life's deepest Shakespearian question seems to have become "2D, or not 2D? That is the question."

The impact of a technology is to be measured not only by what it enables us to do, but also by what it prevents or discourages us from doing. The new 2D digital technology, while enabling a lot, is preventing or competing with many traditional cultural and social treasures and pleasures.

Obvious costs include kids' alienation from woods, meadows, physical play, swimming and bike riding; and online relationships that consist only of spaghetti-strings of screen-to-screen IMF characters, displacing face-to-face (or hand-in-hand) connections, which were traditionally based more on in-person character than impersonal ASCII characters.

The screens of New Flatland also prevent or compete with having spontaneous, natural conversation and new acquaintanceships. Such conversations rarely, if ever, spontaneously start in public places anymore, such as at bus stops, in cafes, lineups, parks, on buses, or at scenic/historical tourist spots (which, you would think, provide natural opportunities and catalysts for a striking up a conversation with others). That kind of spontaneity, warmth, curiosity, playfulness and adventurousness now, more than ever, seems to have become a Hollywood special effect, added to provide, as compensation, the kind of real-life human experiences the 2D media, like the movies themselves, have displaced!

So, the innocent and perky "Excuse me, where are you from?" - something I often heard on the mainland in my three years there and frequently in Japan, before that, is sorely missed here in Hong Kong. Here, Hong Kong police, being very friendly, low-key and polite, never ask. Neither does anyone else.

My favorite restaurant in Hong Kong, Greenland, located in Aberdeen, is my favorite because of the budget-friendly food and good service, not because of the large HDTV screens on all of its walls that draw its diners like unmindful (in both senses of that word) moths to a digital flat flame frame - apart from those rare solo diners whose eyes are not otherwise riveted on their cell phone games, text messages and other digital-fidgetal distractions.

I eat there virtually daily and have never seen anyone except me people-watching, most preferring to vacuously gaze at whatever Big Bother (yes, "Big Bother") serves up, including an image of a steaming bowl of rice, boringly drying like paint on the screen (even when there is an identical real and better bowl of steaming rice smack in front of them, on their tables!).

In the midst of my reviewing this article one last time, one of our editors, without knowing what I was working on, came up to me, pointed to the HDTV screen on the wall, to laughingly call my attention to the evening news report about a new Japanese "virtual barbecue" website that allows New Flatlanders to view 2D food being barbecued while they are eating only their real 3D rice.

That's one solution to the problem of global hunger - next, I suppose is to have only virtual 2D kids with 2D mouths (like the equally virtual Japanese digital-egg pet, "Tamagochi", of the 1990s).

The worrisome aspect of the omnipresent big screen is that a principle of "bigger is better" has come to dominate the limited 2D-thinking - if you can call it that-of both those who supply and those who demand the all-too-often pointless, banal baby-rattle audio-visual digital content on these huge screens. ("Ooooo! Look! Something is on the screen! Let's watch it.") Anything and everything on a screen becomes mesmerizing if the screen is big enough, a belief expressed by the technologically more primitive counterpart, the 0-dimensional noise of the frequently encountered loudmouth, who personifies and trumpets the equivalent acoustic idea that it doesn't matter what is said, just so long as it loud - the big-volume cornerstone principle of much big-volume TV advertising and almost all commercials, to which big movements and hyperactive motion are added for babies of all ages.

Expats, who, twenty years ago, would have spoken with, and often befriended, other, unfamiliar expatriates on Hong Kong's streets or in its cafes - at least to pool or to elicit survival and entertainment tips - basically ignore each other now. Why? One reason is that their New Flatland laptop Internet screens meet most of their information needs, without the hassle of exploring untested human relationships. If you don't believe this, go to Stanley Market - anytime, anywhere, bars excepted, since they release the inner, non-digital child - and just observe. Note the contrast with the 3D festive and convivial Sunday gatherings of thousands of Hong Kong's Filipinos who show up with salad toppings rather than laptops.

I can be forgiven for being paranoid enough to suggest that all of this machine-induced withdrawal from the 3D physical and social world sounds like a (digital-) machine conspiracy to divide, then conquer us, starting by making themselves so human-friendly that we become machine-friendly and dependent enough to isolate ourselves from direct contact with each other - as if the simultaneous development of human-like machines and machine-like humans wasn't enough to worry about.

On top of this, the impact of New Flatland may be physiological as well as social, intellectual, economic, strategic and emotional. Ask yourself this: When was the last time your eyes followed a real ball - any ball hurtling towards or away from you? Decades ago, a Japanese ophthalmologist suggested that the reason so many urban Japanese were nearsighted was that they had few opportunities to exercise their eyes by alternately focusing on near and distant objects.

It's only speculation, but it may be that there are many people in Hong Kong and around the world who are, from childhood (when most of us are supposed to be physically hyperactive), wearing glasses because their 2D floor-potato addictions (sitting too close to the TV, surfing the Net too long) compete with, or altogether eliminate distance-and-focus, eye-and-hand-based real-world 3D activities, such as playing real-world ball sports, that require focusing on a fast-moving, approaching and/or receding object. Of course, it can reasonably be argued that for many of them, the 2D addiction is the effect, not the cause of their myopia.

On the other hand, 2D addictions may be compensation rather than cause. Sure, there's lots of eye-hand coordination in mindless video games, but there's no real "depth", in any sense of the word. On the other hand, the current epidemic of video game addiction may make some sense and actually be a sign of something healthier than merely dumbed-down, pseudo-combat, pseudo-male rites of passage and other distractions of young males, namely, a manifestation of the irrepressible, desperate and now increasingly frustrated human instinct to run, roam, track and explore in real space, to have visual surprises, adventures and encounters of the kind mankind has known and enjoyed since the dawn of homo sapiens, but which are increasingly unavailable in physically, visually and emotionally cramped modern city life.

You are, at this very moment, gazing into but one zone of your Hong Kong New Flatlandized existence - the flat, 2-dimensional iPhone or computer screen on which you are reading this, or the "Old Flatland" format of a paper newspaper. The good, hopeful news is that this demonstrates that some things in Flatland can be used to help us escape Flatland, much as Old Flatland's warmly intimate Norman Rockwell paintings on a 2D-canvas or our transformations of 2D piano sheet music in E-flat into the uplifting Chopin nocturne can still liberate and propel us from Flatland - like a prison spoon that can be fashioned into a prison-break tool.

However, Old Flatland, i.e., pre-digital Flatland, the world of wooden chess and mahjong boards, hand-written letters, paper books, blackboards and white boards (see photo, above), paintings and sheet music, despite its many intensely uplifting merits (such as great intellectual and creative challenges) also had its downside.

It has been speculated that one quintessential symbol of Old Flatland, the mirror-one of the most concrete symbols of Renaissance (and eventually isolating) individualism, diminished and even displaced primal face-to-face human, primate grooming pairs, in carrying out the task of keeping our body surfaces healthy and attractive. The sociability of our genetically closest relatives, the chimpanzees, might immediately vanish if they mastered and preferred the grooming use of 2D mirrors.

The French philosopher Pascal once said that most of man's troubles stem from his inability to sit quietly alone in a room.

The New Flatland version of this is, "Most of our troubles stem from an inability to be alone or with others in a room without digital toys." - an overstatement, but an appropriate and counter-balancing attention-getter, in New Flatland, where getting attention by any means, through no or bad screening, is too often the main reason for the screens.

Now, time to go for a brisk 3D walk to clear and save my mind.

The author is a China Daily editor and university lecturer in philosophy and critical thinking. Comments and queries can be sent to michaelmoffa@gmail.com.

(HK Edition 11/28/2009 page7)