Not to Scale: How the Small Becomes Large and the Large Becomes Unthinkable and the Unthinkable Becomes Possible by Jamer Hunt (Grand Central Publishing, New York 2020)

 Reviewed by Ron Burnett

“What sense of scale are we learning when we peer into our computer screens, our smartphones, and our tablets? How are its laws of physics remaking ours?” (65)

This important question is at the heart of Jamer Hunt’s vital and well written book. Scale can be thought of in many different ways. Nearly every moment of our lives is taken up with judgments about the space we inhabit and the manner in which we negotiate distance, closeness and volume. When you drive down a street for example, the main tasks are to maintain an awareness of width, length (which is bound up with destination) and scale. Steering a car is about moving through space and time conscious of the constraints of traffic and human movement but also being prepared for sudden shifts in scale and a variety of other dynamic interactions. But when you drive a car on a screen, the application of real-life experiences to a simulation alters your physical and psychological responses. The visual cues as Hunt puts it are an illusion, “that tricks our body, our brain and our senses.” (65) The implications are many. What happens when those illusions interfere with reactions to real world situations? As windscreens convert into information sources and visual displays, guides for driving, and cars become more and more autonomous, questions of scaling, framing and context become even more important and also easier to forget about.  

Hunt uses the example of Google Maps to delve into this issue in greater depth. He focuses on the zooming camera that can become microscopic and quickly reverse itself to become a wide lens view of a greater area — infinite detail to maximal view — from the window of a house to the suburb the house is in and so on. As the film made by the National Film Board, Cosmic Zoom, showed many years ago, it is possible to move from a mosquito biting the arm of an individual into their blood stream and from there into their cellular structure and the chemistry of the body and then back out from the arm to the exterior body to the location of individual on a boat in the middle of a lake and then onwards till the camera has moved through space and time into the cosmos. From the microbe to the planet and the Milky Way.

Hunt also talks about framing as an organizational tool to both limit and expand our field of view. If you think about scale, you can also think about context. (170) “…we can use the units of scalar framing—the individual, the family, the neighbourhood, the community, the city and so forth—(to) …draw concentric circles of immediacy in order to determine at which scale we feel our actions beat fit with our moral and political values.” (166) Moving outwards from the ‘individual’ to the ‘family’ to the ‘neighbourhood’ to the ‘community’ and to the ‘city’ shows how each category brings to mind different scales not only of relationships but of interaction. Viewed from a distance, these ‘frames’ make perfect sense but viewed from within or in an unscaled fashion, it is very difficult to understand how they interact. This has ramifications for politics as well as for daily life. What sits outside these ways of framing reality and what is inside?

It all comes down to vantage point and perspective. As networks grow in size and complexity for example, our ability to frame and understand our vantage points, the ways in which we can see and understand the complex interaction of all the parts that make up a network decreases putting us at risk of losing our way. “Like complexity, scale has characteristics, idiosyncrasies and patterns. It subverts, destabilizes and surprises.” (231) “The evolution from industry to information, the shift from atoms to bits, and the bewildering effect of entangled networks have collectively refigured our capacities in ways that make our old maps irrelevant.” (232)

This is an important book for anyone interested in the profound shifts brought about by contemporary technological innovations that may take us generations to understand. It is an exciting and profound read.