Social Blindness

Blinded

Total darkness can take over ones’ sight, leaving the individual barely capable of forming cognitive images, and experiencing the inevitable dependency on the words of others, thus allowing physical blindness to cripple even the most independent of individuals. The phenomenon of social blindness can describe one who leans not on their own understandings, but instead on the understandings of those surrounding them, which is a trend all too common in the modern world. In “Selections from Losing Matt Shepard: Life and politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder”, transcribed by Beth Loffreda, mass media affected the spread of the truth behind an incident and blindly lead the majority of the United States population to believe various aspects of the murder of Matt Shepard that were created by the media. The spread of unrestrained information about the murder was only possible with the assistance of today’s largest medium, the internet. In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” author, Nicholas Carr explained how modern individuals no longer check the validity or exposition of a source, but “Power Browse” for the facts and important aspects of what they are reading. Whether the article is false or valid has little to no effect on the decision making of reader, for all they look to obtain from the text is information… right or wrong. Yet, with this more efficient and immediate form of information extraction, there is a tangible loss of deep reading and the ability to “See.” In “The Mind’s Eye: What the Blind See” the author, Oliver Sacks, gave a few accounts of individuals who were blind in the common meaning of the word that could “See” more than most individuals that had a fully functioning optical mechanism. Today’s society conta...

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...ess, a slow, almost prehensile attention, a sensuous, intimate being at one with the world which sight, with its quick, flicking, facile quality, continually distracts us from,” (Sacks 313). It has been stated that throughout one’s life they maintain a malleable brain that can adapt to multiple situations, which in this case blindness. At the onset of blindness, the brain begins to rewire itself by spreading into the areas of optical stimulation and the brain manipulates them to aide with the expansion of the other senses. The rewiring of the brain accounts for the blind being known as “Whole-Body Seers,” since the senses of their body’s have matured more than normal in the absence of visual stimulation. As “Whole-Body Seers,” the blind claim to be sensitive to inflections in the pitch of others voices that show signs of emotions not present to the ordinary eye.