What are we doing on the web? We extrapolate our concerns and our beliefs. We forge prototypes and stereotypes and we want you to visit our page without thinking that Internet users are real people who have their own tastes, beliefs, preferences and desires.
Don Benjamín Subercaseaux dictated a course in Psycho Anthropology at the University of Concepción (Chile), in which he condensed his Theory of Summarized Denaturing and published by Editorial Andrés Bello (1961) under the title of "The Unfinished Man." Many of its concepts are essential for understanding the world we live in.
One of them and perhaps the most important is the idea that the vast majority of human beings live immersed in the “customary perception” of the nature that surrounds them.
It is seldom possible to take a "fresh look", to see like a child seeing things and concepts for the first time.
To explain what "customary perception" is, Subercaseaux tells us that it is about "talking or writing about nature, separating it from the observer, with true objectivity and subjectivity… therefore, (it is about) seeing and discovering it."
In other words, it means that unlike a cow, a tree or a stone (which does not see the landscape because it is part of it), the human being can differentiate himself from his surroundings.
It seems that most of the time and most of the people only act by imitation and never differ from the landscape. Human beings who do get to do it in a habitual way are usually called geniuses. I think that in general, human beings are capable of separating ourselves, from time to time, from the landscape, without necessarily being geniuses.
According to Alvin Toffler in "The Shock of the Future" human beings respond to stimuli with an Orientation Response (OR) that tells us what it is that has stimulated us and then continues with an Adaptation Response (AR) that prepares to accept or reject the stimulus. In general it is the most primary impulse of attack or flight. The same thing happens to us as to all animals.
It has been proven that a frog in the wild, in a puddle or lagoon, does not react to the fall of a leaf on calm waters. The leaf does not exist (I repeat: it does not exist) for the frog because it is not a hunter who can devour it nor is it food. On the other hand, the frog responds very quickly if a fly falls into the water or if the waves are produced by the legs of a stork.
This is very logical. What would happen to the animal that had to react to each stimulus? A stone, a shadow or a cloud, for example. He would surely go crazy. That is why the frog does not see the leaf fall and that it does not exist for it.
If we had to respond to the millions of stimuli we would go crazy. I mean that our behavior would not be appropriate to the motivation. It is quite possible that in that sense we are all a little crazy.
In fact, we are all aware that we have developed a kind of blindness and deafness in the face of advertising. Who is aware that the radio or television is working? Who reads the billboard ads while traveling on the highway?
But beyond this semi-conscious elimination of certain stimuli, there may be others that we do not perceive (and that perhaps we will never grasp) because they are outside of our customary perception, such as the falling of the leaf for the frog.
There's something else Subercaseaux is warning us about. We live immersed in a totally artificial "second nature" that we have manufactured generation after generation and that conditions our perception.
To make this idea clear, it is enough to take a look around us. What is in the natural state? Inside a room, it is possible that even the air is conditioned and that there is nothing as nature produces it.
But it is not only about what surrounds us, but about the ideas and concepts that we have forged to live in this nature of human manufacture, such as the "anthropomorphism of the concept of man", (in Subercaseaux's words) which more or less means that we have manufactured an image of the human being, which has very little to do with the reality of who we are and that we accept and adjust our behavior or try to adjust it to that pattern or image.
The same thing happens with society and the norms of social behavior. We do things because “they have always been done that way” or because it is what “we have always done” or “it is what I am expected to do”.
What are we doing on the web? We extrapolate our concerns and our beliefs. We forge prototypes and stereotypes and we want you to visit our page without thinking that Internet users are real people who have their own tastes, beliefs, preferences and desires. What would happen if a page was made to suit the target group? I wonder, what would happen if for once, to do something different, we start to think about the usual perception? Maybe something could improve.
