Are you too lazy to rotate your phone? Are you hoping evolution does this to your face?

Humans would rather change shape than turn their phones sideways. It's the only logical conclusion after years of commuting and seeing every generation of Londoner and New Yorker watching vertical format video – despite their eyes still being on their head side-by-side.

There is no reason not to turn the phone on the side. There is plenty of horizontal format video out there that simply makes more sense to the mind, yet we all choose not to for some reason.

Personally I'm old enough to remember when we all got excited about 'widescreen' (16:9) TVs replacing 4:3 ones – providing the extra width for a more natural look.

That was when TVs were still largely cathode ray tubes, and there were a lot of reasons to be suspicious about such an 'upgrade', but it was definitely closer to the shape in the theater – which was the virtue that the TV sales folk were hammering home.

Now we live in a world some folk are trying to sell us phones that we flip, fold and open – yet most people don't even bother to rotate them. So much so that we've created a whole new generation of capture device!

You can get drones that rotate their cameras in the sky just to capture video in portrait format. The best 360 cameras make it easy to re-format video after you've shot it, as do cameras with open gate video – getting portrait format and widescreen!

So what's up with us? Why don't we seem to want the video to be 'epic' and 'immersive', as Hollywood promised us things would be when we all started buying TVs in 16:9 'widescreen'? (Of course, compared to some cinema formats, 16:9 isn't actually that 'wide' – but that's a conversation for another day…)

At first I didn't really get it. I still don't quite. After all, the first big video platform online – the one that still ruled the roost when the iPhone and the App Store created the phone we recognize today – was YouTube.

And YouTube was (at first, anyway) exclusively in landscape format, like most monitors on the web. And TVs, even in the not-that-wide 4:3 days, were still in landscape format. So most content, at first, was horizontal.

A TV could only be in one format once it was made, after all – unlike a phone it is big and heavy and hard to re-position to fit whatever content has just arrived. So everyone goes with the most logical arrangement for humans, right?

Yes, yes they do. The most logical arrangement is to have the image broader than it is tall because that is how our eyes are arranged. It's what, evolutionarily, helps us perceive the world around us and move around it. Only animals that behave unusually need their eyes arranged any other way (ask my friend the Wolf Spider).

So far as I can see, the iPhone and followers introduced most people to 'tall' screens, taking up the space once occupied with buttons with even more screen, meaning that users then had the choice of rotating their device to efficiently view video full-screen, or just seeing black bars. And some people just went with the black bars.

Moreover, some software developers didn't allow for rotation immediately anyway – which created doubt. Doubt created the chance at portrait format video and, from then, it was bound to happen that someone would do it.

It seems that many of us don't even want to go to the effort of turning our phones. We'd rather the content turned to suit us. The whole creation system was turned on its head.

Even if it means we lose the 'epic' feeling of width because our eyes – if we're honest – have not moved into a vertical arrangement like the additional eyes of the Wolf Spider.

I used to think that mattered a lot (and, as a creator, it is definitely super annoying), but perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps it is a clever delineation between video content that has (or is trying to have) artistic merit, and content that is largely about the self.

Selfie format? Portrait format? TikTok? It's all one and the same, right?

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To see my review of the new rotating camera drone, checck the DJI Mavic 4 Pro, or the cheaper DJI Mini 4 Pro. Don't forget to look for the best 360 degree cameras too, and check out the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 with rotating camera and screen!