Humans, COVID-19 and Platform Societies
Stefania Vicari, Zheng Yang · Bristol University Press eBooks · 2022
This chapter explores the experience of disability, my blindness, and of ageing and I will show how scientific responses to COVID-19 have rendered their combination not only as a site of vulnerability, but also as a life barely worth living. I will explore how vision together with its sister, the virtual, have diminished touch. These explorations suggest that the already dominant voices of science and of vision are enhanced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Science and vision have all but replaced any other ways of knowing in the West and, indeed, globally. They combine to render touch as both an inferior sense in relation to sight and as a sense (sight) of danger, of contagion. Finally, I will show how blindness and old age co-mingle and how science has used COVID-19 as the occasion to emphasize the diminished humanity of both