Week 9: Stories Told By Artifacts

I, like some other cool people here in our group, was also part of Matt Price and Matt Ratto’s Culture and Technology class last semester. Our semester-long project involved analyzing multiple dimensions of almost any artifact we wanted to tackle.

I chose the contact lens.

This artifact interested me because the contact lens, in my mind, had only recently come into being. I mean, how could it not be recent? Just the technology to create it must be sophisticated (a soft, miniature lens that fits snugly onto your eye?!), and the idea itself must have been thought up long after the invention of glasses due to that limitation.

What’s interesting is that the contact lens actually has a long line of history dating back to 1508 when Leonardo da Vinci first came up with the concept (for reference: my guess was 500 years off). I also learned other things I would not have otherwise: how a contact lens is made, what type of professionals are involved in its creation, as well as distribution and patterns of use around the world. For myself, there weren’t many complications, and finding the answers usually just involved scouring the Internet for the facts and data I needed. Occasionally, the answers would be hidden within videos (i.e. the specifics of the manufacturing process and the tools required to make a contact lens).

Bigger questions started coming up when I looked into the political and economic dimensions of the contact lens. Questions like how they can be used as a determinant for social standing, and the multiple reasons to wear (or not wear) contact lenses beyond just eyesight.