Vertical Horizontal, Portrait Landscape – Sng Jianming Joshua

Vertical/Horizontal; Portrait/Landscape
By Sng Jianming Joshua

Hurtling through the man-made subterranean caverns that undergird Singapore, he noticed that the attention of his fellow travellers had been ensnared by the ubiquitous mobile phones that extended from their palms like an additional, mechanical appendage. They were all watching something on those tiny screens of theirs, either in portrait or landscape mode.

The score for today was: Portrait 1-1 Landscape.

Among the passengers sharing the silver tube that sliced through time and space with a ferocity that would have astonished prehistoric man, or so he assumed, was an Ah Ma who chuckled to herself at a rate of one chuckle per ten seconds and one strangled guffaw every thirty seconds, demonstrating admirable restraint in spite of herself because this was the Singapore Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system after all. Her phone though remained impressively upright in her right hand, a stoic monument of calm amidst every chuckle and guffaw.

According to the practice of many of her generation, she watched what she watched in high fidelity sound. He was no audiophile but he assumed it was high fidelity because he could hear with crystal clarity what was emanating from that tiny screen even though he stood ten metres away from her. He simply could not ignore the aural assault on his personal soundscape. He swayed and surfed along with the undulations of the train, watching enviously as she nestled within the coveted corner seat and her cocoon of sound. 

Representing the landscape viewers today was an uncle, or maybe just a man with greying hair, who made a beeline for the first seat that became unoccupied the moment the doors beeped open at Little India. After securing a seat to call home for the remaining twenty minutes of his commute, he watched his video contentedly in landscape mode. Unlike the Ah Ma though, he viewed the video in a world of his own, sequestered by his lavender earbuds from the metallic grunts and screeches and human chatter.

Why would someone choose to watch something in portrait over landscape or vice versa?

Was it even a matter of choice?

If the Ah Ma had been watching a video forwarded to her on WhatsApp by one of her similarly aged friends, then it was likely that it would be filmed or at least edited to fit a portrait view. 

But what if she had been watching a video on YouTube? Could someone endure watching a video in smaller dimensions when they had the choice to simply turn the phone on its side to enjoy a more expansive view? Did it require that much effort to tap on the Orientation Lock icon on the phone to free it from the tyranny of a portrait-only view?

So were the landscape viewers the truly sane people on the train? Or they had to at the least be people who cared enough to make the supreme effort to toggle between a portrait or landscape perception of what transpired on the screens of their phones, and perhaps, their lives?

But there was a third species of traveller: those who were able to divest themselves of their phones long enough to take a nap or to observe the comings and goings of this common ground they shared, albeit ephemerally. 

What sort of power did they have access to that afforded them such superhuman self-control?

There was the auntie with rust poodle-coloured hair wearing an off-white, long-sleeved top that matched her off-white dad cap, that featured an upper case, royal blue (or was it more Cookie Monster blue) letter B  in embossed embroidery. She nodded off at a rate one nod per four seconds, fighting the deluge of drowsiness that overcomes one in these moving trains. Yet, in her somnambulism, she never loosened her iron grip on whatever lay within her jade green Four Leaves plastic bag.

Then there was the pair of elderly uncles, one with a full, glorious head of silver hair; the other nearly-bald, with some remnant strands of silver adorning the folds of skin on the back of his skull. 

The former fiddled incessantly with the gold ring on the ring finger of his left hand. The onyx stone that was set within threatened to swallow everything into its abyss. 

The latter clutched his copper walking cane tightly as his gaze darted around the crowded (it's always crowded on the NEL) cabin of solo travellers. He snapped his neck to the left, then to the right, then to me who stood before him, but always with a look of disgruntlement that reverberated through his crooked upper lip. 

They weren't watching anything on their phones. If they even had phones.