Please note!

This is an archived, inactive copy of
"Malaise"

Please do not link to this page.


November 10, 2004

Malaise

Posted by bopuc at November 10, 2004 08:44 PM

New environments inflict considerable pain on the perceiver

The biologist Otto Lowenstein, is his book on The Senses (Penguin Books,Ltd.), has some most helpful observations on the problems that arise upon any change in sensory mode, such as a result from a technological creation of a new environment:

... patients, blind from childhood, on whom normal vision has been bestowed by an operation. Previous to this "opening of the eyes," they had been living in a world of tactile experience, of sound and scent, full of objects familiar to them in terms of their restricted range of sensory experience. How they shrink at first from the welter of additional stimulation, longing at times to return to the relative seclusion of their former world!

- Marshall McLuhan - War and Peace in the Global Village

Comments