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# Life through the (smart) rectangle
- URL: https://onemanandhisblog.com/2018/05/life-through-the-smart-rectangle/
- Published: 2018-05-14T21:03:08.000Z
- Updated: 2018-05-14T21:03:08.000Z
- Description: The rise of the Stories format is forcing us to accept that the smartphone is creating brand new forms of media.
- Author: Adam Tinworth
- Tags: smartphones, stories, instagram stories, media formats

This is possibly the most beautiful encapsulation of how the smartphone is changing our relationship with media that I've come across:

> The rectangle now frames experience. Information is rectangle-shaped, retrieved from searches in Google or apps or voice assistants. Personal communication comes in the form of a list of bubbles spilling down a rectangle. The physical world can be accessed by a map scaled to the boundaries of the rectangle, which can also provide way-finding through it. Music, movies, and television appear on these screens, and increasingly there alone. The rectangle is also an imaging device, capable of capturing a view of the world in front of it and the operator behind it.

It's part of Ian Bogost's piece on the "Stories" format for *The Atlantic*, which digs deep into the technology and cultural context around this growing format in Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook:

> The liveness of smartphone-authorship, combined with the ephemerality of the Story format, makes it a catalog of the experience of holding and looking through a rectangle almost all the time.  
> This makes me think of a famous definition of photography by the prolific 20th-century street photographer Garry Winogrand: “A still photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how a camera ‘saw’ a piece of time and space.” Likewise, a Story is the illusion of what your smartphone saw. Or better, of what the hybrid you-and-your-smartphone saw—as if there was a you without a smartphone, anymore.

[Well worth a read](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/smartphone-stories-snapchat-instagram-facebook/559517/?ref=onemanandhisblog.com).