I suspect that egocentricity is an evolutionary tool for survival. We are bombarded daily by media reports on environmental and man-made disasters and we’d have an awfully difficult time with day-to-day functioning if we couldn’t filter the overwhelming and turn inward to our happy place. When disastrous world events happen we pull out our chequebooks or text ‘RedCross’ to make donations, then return to navel-gazing in our own world of petty annoyances and difficulties, large or small. It’s a challenge to walk a mile in someone else’s boots, to see what world events would mean if they had been centred over our own house and family and not thousands of miles away.
The BBC has launched a prototype website, Dimensions at www.howbigreally.com that aims to alter our experience of historical events and places. By typing in a postal code, Dimensions enables users to place themselves in the middle of an event or place through map overlays. The BBC’s goal is to “bring home the human scale of events and places in history.” For instance, if the Chernobyl radiation cloud were centred on my house, it would encapsulate the continental United States, extend south to central Mexico, and swallow up eastern Canada north to the Arctic Circle. The Great Wall of China? It would start in Iowa and end at the mouth of the St. Lawrence.
A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words.