Contrary to popular belief, people in east Asia are no more genetically susceptible to short-sightedness than any other population group, according to researchers who have analysed past studies of the problem. The epidemics of myopia in countries such as Singapore and Japan are due solely to changes in lifestyle, they say, and similar levels could soon be seen in many western countries as lifestyles there continue to change. "As kids spend more time indoors, on computers or watching telly, we are going to become just as myopic," says Ian Morgan of the Australian National University in Canberra. [...] There is little doubt about at least one underlying cause. Children now spend much of their time focusing on close objects, such as books and computers. To compensate the eyeball is thought to grow longer. That way less effort is needed to focus up close, but the elongated eye can no longer focus on distant objects.
One does wonder what, exactly, can be done about this. To be sure, you can send kids outside to play more, and the back and forth may undo some of the damage. But it's unlikely that kids will be asked to read significantly less in schools; it's unlikely that the parents will change their own lives to get rid of the television and the video games and all the other things that require close focusing.
It's interesting to speculate about the ways this will affect different aspects of life. For example, one of the things that's likely to happen in sports is that people playing football or baseball or anything requiring lots of back and forth hand-eye coordination are going to wind up getting startlingly early lasik surgery to fix their myopia, because they can't function otherwise. The armed services of various countries will either start accepting recruits with that sort of surgery -- many refuse to accept recruits with that sort of corrective surgery because it can abruptly go very wrong -- or start providing it themselves because it's the only way they can get troops capable of aiming their weapons. There'll be this whole massive high-tech industry springing up to provide vision aids.
And television screens will, of course, become immense, because those paltry little 17-or-19-inch screens will be just way too small for people to see any more. The minimum will be something like a 45-inch screen, and from there, the sky's the limit! On the other hand, maybe the protests against media indecency will die down a bit, because we'll all be too blind to see. "Wait... was that Janet Jackson's nipple again? Or maybe it was just a spot on the screen...."
Posted by iain at July 08, 2004 11:03 AM
