There’s an Alternative to the Infinite Scroll
Metadata
Highlights
- In Chinese traditional art, there are two main types of scroll: the hanging scroll and the handscroll. Unlike a hanging scroll, which was displayed on a wall for long periods, a handscroll painting would be kept rolled up until the time came for viewing. Then, the owner would retrieve it from storage (often an ornate cabinet), place it on a table, and, with some sense of ceremony, carefully untie the cords and brocade silk bindings to begin unfurling it.
While we typically scroll in isolation through context-collapsing timelines, the Chinese handscroll was social media in a different sense. It was meant to be viewed collectively in small groups, perhaps during an evening of drinking and discussion. Viewers would experience the painting like a panorama, unspooling from right to left. If you’ve ever encountered a handscroll painting in a museum, you’ve likely seen it laid out in full, but this completely defies the way they were designed to be seen: unrolled slowly, one section coming into view at a time and then disappearing, akin to a tracking shot in film—or the experience of scrolling on a digital screen. (View Highlight)
- The handscroll’s social dynamics were also reflected in the colophon, or end papers, where owners and visiting viewers would write clever commentary. More high-pressure than a “like” or a reply to a social media post, the colophon comments were considered an opportunity to genuinely improve the painting; poets sometimes joked about the stress they felt to pen something worthwhile. The ongoing nature of the colophon rendered the artwork a continuous collaboration across time—sometimes centuries—rather than something that could be finished and put away. (View Highlight)
- Indeed, one of the handscroll’s most salient features was its ability to stretch and bend time, creating a static cinema that would be regenerated each time it was opened: the current of history flowing, but never the same river twice. Unlike our scrolls, their dimensions were finite, their cadence was slow, their social context was intimate, and their creation and consumption were highly intentional, even ritualistic. The handscroll painting did not renounce the human impulse for novelty and spectacle, angst and gossip, but rather cultivated and rewarded a more sustained form of curiosity and attention. (View Highlight)
- If our social media feeds and devices banished the infinite scroll, incentivized a slower pace, encouraged contemplation and context, and supported smaller communities of deeper solidarity, perhaps scrolling could become human-scaled again. (View Highlight)
- Seen in this light, the doomscroll has been the essential mode of our time, embodying the vertigo of an age of global crisis. As we move toward whatever comes next, we might even grow nostalgic for it. The verb “doomscroll” suggests passivity, a helpless and anesthetized absorption of stimulation we can barely feel anymore. But maybe foregrounding scroll’s past life as a noun is a reminder that this is also an active and emotional practice, a desire to face the onrush of catastrophe and to witness history. (View Highlight)
- Her work highlights the way that scrolling through social media feeds during those seasons of unrest made every doomscroller a documentarian, simultaneous director and audience of a powerful montage that could not be repeated, that always held the potential to either become a numbing spectacle or spark radical action.
“Human-scaled” scrolling may always be impossible on the extractive platforms most accessible to us. But the doomscroll still has the potential to help us contemplate and chart history as it unfolds. “How is the passing of time in crisis felt?” Sia asks, “A wet finger in the air trying to grasp the cusp of change is unable to locate its dimensions. The air is as immaterial and unseeable as this moment.” We can also see our thumb perpetually held to the screen as a wet fingertip held in the air, trying to bear witness to the changing winds. (View Highlight)
There’s an Alternative to the Infinite Scroll
Metadata
Highlights
- In Chinese traditional art, there are two main types of scroll: the hanging scroll and the handscroll. Unlike a hanging scroll, which was displayed on a wall for long periods, a handscroll painting would be kept rolled up until the time came for viewing. Then, the owner would retrieve it from storage (often an ornate cabinet), place it on a table, and, with some sense of ceremony, carefully untie the cords and brocade silk bindings to begin unfurling it.
While we typically scroll in isolation through context-collapsing timelines, the Chinese handscroll was social media in a different sense. It was meant to be viewed collectively in small groups, perhaps during an evening of drinking and discussion. Viewers would experience the painting like a panorama, unspooling from right to left. If you’ve ever encountered a handscroll painting in a museum, you’ve likely seen it laid out in full, but this completely defies the way they were designed to be seen: unrolled slowly, one section coming into view at a time and then disappearing, akin to a tracking shot in film—or the experience of scrolling on a digital screen. (View Highlight)
- The handscroll’s social dynamics were also reflected in the colophon, or end papers, where owners and visiting viewers would write clever commentary. More high-pressure than a “like” or a reply to a social media post, the colophon comments were considered an opportunity to genuinely improve the painting; poets sometimes joked about the stress they felt to pen something worthwhile. The ongoing nature of the colophon rendered the artwork a continuous collaboration across time—sometimes centuries—rather than something that could be finished and put away. (View Highlight)
- Indeed, one of the handscroll’s most salient features was its ability to stretch and bend time, creating a static cinema that would be regenerated each time it was opened: the current of history flowing, but never the same river twice. Unlike our scrolls, their dimensions were finite, their cadence was slow, their social context was intimate, and their creation and consumption were highly intentional, even ritualistic. The handscroll painting did not renounce the human impulse for novelty and spectacle, angst and gossip, but rather cultivated and rewarded a more sustained form of curiosity and attention. (View Highlight)
- If our social media feeds and devices banished the infinite scroll, incentivized a slower pace, encouraged contemplation and context, and supported smaller communities of deeper solidarity, perhaps scrolling could become human-scaled again. (View Highlight)
- Seen in this light, the doomscroll has been the essential mode of our time, embodying the vertigo of an age of global crisis. As we move toward whatever comes next, we might even grow nostalgic for it. The verb “doomscroll” suggests passivity, a helpless and anesthetized absorption of stimulation we can barely feel anymore. But maybe foregrounding scroll’s past life as a noun is a reminder that this is also an active and emotional practice, a desire to face the onrush of catastrophe and to witness history. (View Highlight)
- Her work highlights the way that scrolling through social media feeds during those seasons of unrest made every doomscroller a documentarian, simultaneous director and audience of a powerful montage that could not be repeated, that always held the potential to either become a numbing spectacle or spark radical action.
“Human-scaled” scrolling may always be impossible on the extractive platforms most accessible to us. But the doomscroll still has the potential to help us contemplate and chart history as it unfolds. “How is the passing of time in crisis felt?” Sia asks, “A wet finger in the air trying to grasp the cusp of change is unable to locate its dimensions. The air is as immaterial and unseeable as this moment.” We can also see our thumb perpetually held to the screen as a wet fingertip held in the air, trying to bear witness to the changing winds. (View Highlight)