Andrew Krump Blog Post #2

In second grade, I remember looking down the hall at my school and noticing that the door at the end seemed blurry. I told my parents this, and they took me to an eye doctor. Unsurprisingly, I was determined to be near sighted like both of my parents. The ophthalmologist proceeded to prescribe glasses to me. I avoided wearing them at first, because I didn’t like the way they looked on me. Additionally, I also found the change in visual perception (especially the lack of continuity in my peripheral vision) to take some getting used to. Eventually I accepted that seeing more clearly outweighed looking “nerdy” and got used to the positive change in my vision.

I often marvel at my friends who are able to wake up and see perfectly (or at least their visual disturbances are so minimal that they have never sought out contacts or glasses). The science of optometry has constructed the realization in me that I cannot see “normally”. Vision, in my opinion, is the most informationally dense of the five senses. As such, my experience of vision heavily influences my understanding and perception of reality and how I relate to the world. When I remove my contacts or glasses, I can no longer experience reality in as rich of a way. However, on some level this is unnatural. I enjoy being able to see greater distances and with greater clarity, but I have also gotten further away from a pure “me” and moved towards a “better me” that is augmented with visual enhancing technology (prescription lenses). As a result, I can experience a better reality, as determined by my eye doctor and myself. In a certain sense, at least relative to my natural state, I have become scientifically enhanced.

The experience of getting a prescription for contacts or glasses is a unique interaction between “naming” (a diagnostic component: “You are near sighted and see at 20/100”), as well as the use of measuring instruments and systems to transform a subjective disturbance in a sense to a device which is crafted using objective and universal specifications. The diagnostic process starts by having the patient read a list of increasingly small letters. The patient places their eyes in front of a machine that contains a series of lenses that can be arranged to correspond to different lens prescriptions. Combinations are tried systematically until the patient can demonstrate the level of visual acuity of “normal” 20/20 vision. Importantly, a good deal of this process requires that the patient is accurately able to identify increasingly subtle changes in their visual experience as either “better” or “worse”. The doctor attempts to make some of this subjective experience objective by verifying that the patient can read lines which have been calibrated to represent “normal” vision, but outside of this broad hurdle, the patient’s awareness will influence the resulting prescription, and eventually, their entire visual experience when they are using their new prescription. The specifications of the lens the patient identified as offering the most improvement are sent to a lens manufacturer which uses a precision machine to create a piece of glass that has the resulting properties to bend light in a way that replicates the lens that the patient tried at the eye doctor. The same principle applies to contact lenses, but the manufacturer is instead using a polymer (in the case of soft lenses) that achieves the same result while still allowing oxygen to reach the eye and remain properly lubricated. In the case of contact lenses, the choice of material will be influenced by the patient’s perception of comfort and not just the greatest resolving power of the lens.

Latour’s overview of the mapping of the Amazonian soil quality offers some interesting parallels to the science of optometry. Latour notes that the soil scientists are attempting to standardize their subjective observations of the real world (soil color) into an objective medium that can be understood elsewhere and preserved with precision (an exact color value form a palette). Similarly, optometrists standardize subjective feedback from patients (“better” or “worse”; “first” or “second”) into an objective prescription that can be used by a lens manufacturer to create an appropriate lens. Latour also points out that through careful measuring and recreation, the soil scientists have created something new that is an attempt to conceptualize elements of the real world: a map. Optometrists also do this. By creating a corrective lens, optometrists bring into the world a physical representation of the conceptualized visual defects of the patients. This system of conceptualization and decomposition allows me to see better, and my life is better as a result.