Most
of the experiences I have focused on in this column dealing with sensory
distortion in modern technological society have been visual experiences. Yes, I have dealt with noise pollution from
construction sites and from traffic jams and from other situations of modern
life, but mostly just in passing.
Today,
I want to focus on a technological solution to noise pollution and why it just
creates new problems. We now have a way
to not only pass music directly to our ears through headphones, but we have a
way to eliminate all background noise through noise cancelling headphones. Not only do these new headphones get rid of
ambient noise, but, as a result, they improve the quality of the music
experience that we want to have. And of
course they get rid of all the abrasive noises that irritate us anyway: honking
cars, machine noises at construction sites, loud pedestrians, subway
noises. So what could be the problem
with using these headphones?
Imagine
if a person didn’t like the visuals of where he was walking. Imagine that the person found a way to insert
a computer screen in front of his eyes so that he didn’t have to visually
experience the area through which he was walking. We will also imagine that, even though he
wouldn’t be able to see obstacles in his path, that he was somehow able to
navigate around them, maybe through something like sonar. So he would no longer need his sight to avoid
getting hurt. But looking where one
walks has another purpose. It grounds one
in one’s visual living environment. It
puts a person in a unitary field of experience where he is, in a sense, an
integral part of that with which he is surrounded. The person internalizes this. In addition, the unitary field of experience
mirrors the person, and models for him a sense of coherence that the person
internalizes for his sense of self. In
other words, it is not only individual entities that can mirror and model for
people, but whole fields of experience as well.
A
person can’t ground himself in a screen reality, where grounding is always
prevented by a plastic screen. A screen
breaks up a sense of a unitary field of visual experience. And this weakens the possibility of coherence
in a person’s sense of self. By the same
token, noise cancelling headphones, in separating a person from the auditory
field of experience that surrounds him, also weakens the person’s sense of self
from a different sensory perspective.
Granted that hearing is not as important as seeing for humans in order
to navigate successfully in the external world.
But auditory cues tell a person when someone is approaching that he
knows. Perhaps a friend will shout out a
person’s name in order to get his attention.
With noise cancelling headphones, a person hears nothing.
In
effect, noise cancelling headphones fragment what would otherwise be a unitary
field of experience. What we have is a
headphone reality existing alongside a visual external world reality. The two are not connected. And this disjunction leads to a weakened
sense of grounding in both the auditory and visual realms. Which means that both realms together create
in the experiential spaces between them an experiential vacuum which in turn
leads to numbness.
Listening
to music through noise cancelling headphones is not the same as listening to
music on electronic devices without headphones.
In the latter case, the music blends with the noises and voices in the
external world and becomes part of the whole auditory realm of experience and,
by extension, with a person’s whole unitary field of experience. But in today’s world, it becomes more and
more difficult to find people who are interested in building their lives within
more unitary fields of experience. To
gain control over their sensory experiences, people feel a need to compartmentalize
their sensory fields. The screens of
television, computers, video games, smartphones and tables represent
compartmentalized self-contained patches of visual experience that are totally
separate from what is going on in the visual world around them. To the extent that there are noises, voices,
and music without headphones, they can blend more easily with the noises,
voices and music occurring already in the external world reality.
A
broken-up field of experience indirectly creates a larger mirroring and
modeling situation where a person, in an unconscious imitation of that which
surrounds him, develops a broken-up sense of self. So, in attempting to gain a greater control
over one’s external living environment through compartmentalizing it and manipulating
one chunk of it at a time, one becomes susceptible to losing control over one’s
internal living environment. Here I am
not talking about inventing new tools that are useful for work, or creating new
products. As long as they are created within external world reality, they
remain a part of a unitary field of experience.
And recorded music that is not bottled up by headphones can blend in, to
some extent, with the noises and voices of a larger unitary field of
experience. Unlike visual screen reality,
which becomes an isolated patch of a larger field of experience, recorded music
without headphones can be a little closer to listening to a live
performance. Not exactly, because
there’s no visual group of people playing instruments and singing. But recorded music without noise-cancelling
headphones can enhance the external world experiences and events in which one
is participating within the external world.
And
by contrast, so it is that when the recorded music is experientially isolated
from the larger external world reality that larger problems emerge. This may sound like an extreme interpretation
of something as seeming innocent as a type of headphones. But so much inventing of new products is going
on in today’s world and there is so much psychological pathology present among
today’s humans. And it’s my belief that
many of these seemingly innocent new products are not so innocent in their negative
psychological effects on the people who are using them.
© 2018 Laurence Mesirow
No comments:
Post a Comment