The phone is king. We are its subjects. Phone screens are vertical, set up for portrait mode, and our world must change to fit that frame. Cricket, of all things, is leading the way. The World Cup is presently being televised longways, so to speak, so you can watch it on your phone like you might watch TikTok. This offering comes to us courtesy of the streaming platform Disney+ Hotstar. Zeebiz.com says this feature “facilitates a one-handed viewing experience, aligning with the way most users consume content”. Makes it sound a tad smutty if you ask me.
To be fair, cricket does lend itself to portrait mode because the action is generally shown from behind the stumps, so the wicket fits the up-down format. It is the same with tennis. Lucky for cricket, lucky for tennis. But whither football, which is televised side on? Radical change is necessary. To optimise phone viewing in portrait mode, we must move the goals from the short sides of the pitch to the long sides, and televise it from one of the short ends. The new playing area will be very short and very wide. The corner kicks will have to be more like goal kicks and keepers will be well within shooting range of the other goal. Chaos. But football must change or die.
At home, our televisions will have to turn through 90 degrees; there will be a roaring trade in swivel-brackets. Widescreen will become “tallscreen”. God knows what cinemas will do. Dramas will have to be shot differently. No more scenes of conversations between people sitting next to each other. There will be a rash of films featuring relationships between window cleaners up ladders and their mates standing at the bottom. Characters will have to have deep and meaningful discussions while sitting behind one another on staircases.
This will all run against nature as, having eyes side by side (although evolution will surely correct this eventually), we see the world in landscape rather than portrait mode. Or do we? Assessing this, I moved my eyeballs up and down and side to side so much that they got a bit sore, so I searched for an answer on my (landscape, for now) laptop. And it does, indeed, appear that our horizontal field of vision, at 190 degrees, trumps the vertical, which is less than 120 degrees. Whatever, we will all have to make do with 120 degrees and that’s the end of it. Because if phones see our world in portrait mode, then so must we. For the phone rules over us all.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
