I’d choose to go deaf, of course. On the whole, I like reading much more than music. Oh, and I like driving, riding a bike, hiking, canoeing, pissing standing up, and tons and tons more that depend on sight. Hell, boobs are probably a good enough reason to never part with my vision.
Deaf, since I’m mostly there anyhow. I’m completely deaf in my left ear, and 50% in my right, with the right ear getting worse as I get older. When I get an ear infection in the right, my hearing tends to go out entirely. I don’t much care for it, but being blind would be far worse. I couldn’t imagine never being able to read again. Audio just doesn’t cut it for me, and I don’t think braille would be the same.
Another advantage to being blind rather than deaf-the really ugly people will stand out through their words and actions.
Considering everytime ride the Chicago Public Transit system I want to deafen myself so I want have to hear the annoying cell phone calls of others, I picked deaf 
I just wish we could make this poll even more light-hearted and include the option of being paralyzed.
I’ll take blindness. I love music too much. And I think I could cope with being blind (even though I’d have to find a new way to make a living. Singing career, here I come!).
The same. My singing voice and my verbal interactions with my family, friends, and coworkers are just too important for me to give up. I could adjust to blindness much more easily.
Blind. Losing music would hurt way too much. And I’ve known blind people that did just fine, I could adapt, it’d just take time. It would suck but not as much as losing my hearing.
Going blind would pretty much destroy my life.
Going deaf would just be a blip in comparison. I’d have to learn sign language, and it would be a bit harder to navigate the world full of hearing people, but other than those minor difficulties I can’t think of huge drawbacks. I don’t much care about music.
Deaf. Deaf people can still read normal books.
I’d rather be deaf. Losing music would be terrible, but without sight, I think I’d probably consider just ending it all. I just cannot imagine life without being able to see.
Having both a visual and hearing impairment, (not enough to make me legally blind OR deaf) I would still have to say that I’d rather lose my vision.
Being partially deaf cuts you off from much normal verbal human interaction. Being totally deaf would devastate me. It’s not so much the music or the bird sounds I would miss, but being able to communicate with other people and be part of a functioning group, whether it be with family or otherwise. Deafness isolates the individual far more than blindness does IMHO.
Having glasses and having something pretty close to deafness… I’d much rather just go ahead and lose the hearing, rather than lose my sight AND continue to have my 70% Loss of hearing. Just take it down to 0%. Though if that case did happen for me, I’d certainly try to look into CI, and see if I was a candidate for it and all. :Shrug:
But yeah, growing up deaf sucks, but going deaf afterwords/later in life? It’s a little bit more manageable once you’re your own person vs. blindness would be. Ie: I’d rather be cut off from people than the world for a while.
I could manage going blind (I’d get JAWS for my computer), but I could function much better if I had gone deaf.
Blind. I’m a poet and poetry is all about the sounds. I also think deafness would feel incredibly isolating. Language is one of the most important things in my life. I connect to the world through language and I don’t know ASL. I would be cast into a foreign country without knowing the language and without being able to learn the dominant language at all.
Books on tape aren’t my favorite, but they are doable.
Yes, it would be a major obstacle and no, I wouldn’t cope at all well. But I would choose blindness.
Gah, this is really hard. Being blind would be really scary and difficult, but being deaf would mean no more music, and not being able to talk to people normally. At length, I would have to choose being blind, because of the communication issue. Even though it would make being a writer really hard, I could adapt to the blindness much more easily than to the idea of never being able to have a conversation again with 99.9% of people.
My mother had a profound hearing loss and for several years was nearly totally deaf. At least I could draw on her experience in dealing with deafness.
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Pen and paper. Done and done.
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You can’t have a conversation with some huge percentage of humans right now, and it doesn’t seem to have bothered you.
I really don’t get people who say they’d rather be blind. I think in many cases they just say that because they want to impress others with how into music they are or how they would miss their “deep connections” with other people that are somehow only obtainable through spoken conversations.
Also, I guess I’m in a bit of a bad mood. Sorry if it sounds like I’m jumping on people.
That works for most “practical” communication, but I was thinking more about the hours-long conversations I have on the phone with my sister, my best friend, and other people I care about who live far away. Both my sister and my best friend are fully internet-savvy and so I know from experience what it’s like to have a conversation with them on the phone vs. a conversation in email/AIM/Facebook Chat/etc. Both are good, both have a purpose, but the phone conversations (and conversations in person when we are together) are much better, and much more comforting when I’m having a bad day or have something heavy to talk about. I realize that blindness would be much, much more disorientating and inconvenient, but something in me cringes deeply at the thought of that isolation and lack of solace engendered by limited communication. I don’t have any illusion that I’m “deep” or whatever because of that – it’s just something that the question makes me consider.
I chose deaf because I can’t conceive of losing my sight, particularly since my only real hobby is photography.
However, knowing enough people of both sides of the issue, deafness makes you bitter in a way blindness doesn’t. I recall reading a medical book that asked people who had become blind or deaf if the they would switch, and deaf people were more changey than blind.