English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

If you're making an evolutionary claim, then the answer is community and technology. While other species were devoping longer claws, denser muscles and sharper eyes, human beings were learning to communicate and cooperate and create tools. Think of the history of human (un)natural selection, when twins or albinos, or various disabilities or mutations were killed at birth. You can't tell a child will be near-sighted when they're born, so we never cut that one off at the reproductive pass. How many marvelous evolutionary mutations have been surpressed? Is the sex-reassignment of hermaphroditic children merely a new manifestation of this same impulse to keep the gene pool clean? And, perhpas most importantly, why do the guests so talk-shows produce so many offspring? What we determine as worth reproducing or not is art of biology/genetics.

Two fabulously intersting books to consider on the topic:

Sex and Death: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Biology by Kim Sterelny and Paul Briffiths

and

Telepresence and Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits and Robots by Eduardo Kac. Maybe we should have read this book for this class as it's tied-up in "the cutting edge of media art"

Just an interesting bit of trivia to supplement the discussion. When the telescope and microscope were first invented, people believed that the benefit would be to supplement our eyes, to let us see distant landscapes up closer or see small things much larger. What they didn't realize is that the telescope and microscope would revolutionize human thought by showing us things we have never seen before, such as microbes, atoms, and distant galaxies. The discovery of these things changed humanity's understanding of its place in the universe and its conceptualization of reality.

This is really only vaguely related, but an interesting thing to think about. Neil Postman (one of my favorite authors to read when i want to be really cynical about the rise of technology/visual and the death of print) points out that since television has not been around that long, that it's interesting to think about what extended periods (hours, days, years, decades) of staring directly and often unflinchingly into flickering light does to our eyes. This has simply never happened before at any time in human history. He doesn't provide the answer, because we simply don't know. What are we doing to ourselves!

Or did we suddenly need better eyesight when we moved from an oral tradition to a written one? If you aren't relying on your eyes for important documents (or STOP signs), then some of the changes that come about with middle age might not be as obvious.
Maybe in a few millenia, we'll develop better Text Eyes. Think Geordi LaForge