A Ratna day
(from Leanander archives): Six hours of shopping online doesn't feel the same as six hours of in-person shopping. Less efficient, somehow. It's hard to get a feeling for things - their energy, the space they occupy, their weight and density. The visual faculty can interperet only so far, and when mediated by the screen's light is further distracted. The screen, its light, its pixel-components, its "display" - it is a medium either one step further removed or an altogether different phenomena. What a catalogue displays is somewhat more fixed. The electronic display is sensitive - continuously flickering, emitting. Hence the eyes and their faculty of sight engage differently and report differently to the cognition faculty.
So what the internet shopping saves in the time going from store to store, travelling, stopping and looking, feeling, intuiting, it loses in the time needed to interperet the display for these other felt, unseeable factors.
Originally published November 21, 2009
