Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity

by Edward Tenner

  Here was technological synchronization three hundred years before Henry Ford. Some readers will insist that the musket itself, as a technology, somehow dictated the technique of drill. Certainly, battlefield experience determines which innovations spread and which are abandoned. But techniques do not create themselves, and neither operators nor their supervisors initially understand the full possibilities of devices. Ellul wrote in the shadow of a modernism that still sought a single best way to do everything, and for which (as the architectural critic David Heathcote recently remarked of the British official-planning mentality of the 1960s) “design is the search for the Platonic ideal and … variety is symptomatic of an unsolved problem.” Ellul was right to underscore the constraints of technique, but wrong to deny its creative and improvisational side. In fact the two complement each other. Just when a technique seems to have proved itself inevitable and universal, an individual may develop and spread an alternative method. Organizations and professional groups codify best practice. Gifted individuals from time to time challenge the textbooks, often failing but sometimes revising them.8

  TECHNIQUES OF THE BODY: MARCEL MAUSS

  Ellul, like most analysts of technology, believed in a radical discontinuity between the industrial world and nonindustrial societies. An older French contemporary, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, illuminated a side of technique that Ellul thought was too restrictive and unrelated to modern societies: the role of physical habits, which Mauss called body techniques. Ellul was correct in arguing for a concept of technique that included mental and social practices, but he ignored how important simple body techniques can be even in complex societies.9

  Mauss introduced the idea of body technique almost casually, in an article in a French psychology journal published in 1934. He identified a set of human practices as “effective” and “traditional,” and at the same time “mechanical, physical, or physico-chemical.” These were the ways people learned to do things with their bodies. These patterns of motion were not haphazard; they were produced and inculcated by an entire society. They formed a framework of conduct. He coined the word “habitus” for these socially produced behaviors, which varied systematically “between societies, educations, proprieties and fashions, prestiges.” Prestige was, for Mauss, essential to human body technique. Children imitate the actions of their elders, especially those with formal authority. The learning of body techniques is at once social, psychological, and biological. Mauss gave examples from the dances and rituals of the native peoples of Australia and New Zealand. But some of his most interesting cases are taken from the early-twentieth-century history of sports, and from his own experience.10

  Mauss remembered learning to swim first, then to dive. He also recalled being taught to dive with eyes shut, opening them only after immersion. By the 1930s, when his study of body techniques was published, children were expected to accustom themselves as early as possible to keeping their eyes open in the water, controlling the instinctive tendency to shut them. (The aversion to opening one’s eyes in the water is now considered to be learned; swimming authorities encourage parents to begin instruction in infancy, when moving in water is still innately delightful.) Swimming, like other techniques, was an apprenticeship, but not a static one. Mauss’s generation had learned to swim the breaststroke, with the head above water; by the 1930s, variations of the crawl had prevailed. No longer did swimmers swallow water and spit it as though they were “a kind of steamboat.” Yet Mauss acknowledged that he still could not swim otherwise.11

  Walking was subject to more subtle but still discernible techniques. In the Great War, Mauss recalled, the Western Allies moved differently. The Worcester Regiment, as a token of its valor fighting beside the French infantry in the Battle of the Aisne (he probably meant that of 1914), received special permission to be accompanied by a band of French buglers and drummers. The desired panache failed. For almost half a year, “the regiment had preserved its English march but had set it to a French rhythm.… When they tried to march in step, the music would be out of step, with the result that the Worcester Regiment was forced to give up its French buglers.” And as recently as World War II, an American observer found British troops “looser-jointed than we are, with freer knee action,” and French soldiers with “a long loping swing that seems to use the shoulders to push ahead with.” Were these stylized expressions of each nation’s civilian steps or the choreography of long-forgotten sergeant-majors, enshrined in drill manuals?12

  Of course, soldiers are drilled by noncommissioned officers who build morale partly by teaching these distinctive motions. Their exercises produce what William H. McNeill, in his study of dance and drill, has called “muscular bonding,” the solidarity of rhythmic synchronization. Both national armies and civilians march to different drummers. Mauss began to notice that American and French women also walked differently, and that even in French society, upbringing influenced gait noticeably. Girls raised in convents, for example, walked with fists closed, and Mauss recalled his own third-form teacher “shouting at me: ‘Idiot! why do you walk around the whole time with your hands flapping wide open?’” Mauss believed that many of these differences arose from physical traits. The height of Englishmen, as well as the distinctive gait they had learned from their drillmasters, made it impossible to follow the French military band. Even the goose step had a biological explanation, the German army’s way of achieving the greatest possible extension of the (long) German leg, as distinct from the short, knock-kneed French limb.13

  Mauss was probably exaggerating the role of physical differences. Surely all European conscript armies of World War I included a significant range of heights and body types. And the goose step, officially the parade step, is only an exaggerated form of the Prussian marching style called the Gleichschritt developed in the early eighteenth century. Troops were taught to swing their legs with stiffened knees not only to build morale and cohesion but to produce an ultra-erect posture signifying and building discipline. The gait was also called the ramrod step, as straighter and more efficient iron ramrods replaced wooden ones in the Prussian army in 1718. Striking the rifle barrel with the open hand, while hitting the pavement with the heel, created audible reinforcement. So difficult and constraining is the goose step that it would be disastrous on maneuvers or in combat; its point is virtuosic display of self-mastery, not biomechanical efficiency. Posture and synchronization rather than stride length govern its success. The French military always eschewed this step for a style emphasizing mobility and flexibility. It must have been the difference in marching instruction rather than body proportions that frustrated the Worcester Regiment.14

  WALKING AS A TECHNIQUE

  Mauss had no idea how rich in meaning even a single body technique could be. Cultures can suppress certain techniques; for instance, in Mali, as the anthropologist Katherine Dettwyler found during her fieldwork there, some groups do not allow children to crawl, apparently because of hazards on the ground. At the other extreme, Western technology to accelerate walking may actually impede development. Up to 92 percent of families with babies have infant walkers, wheeled seats that let children move about before they can even crawl. Yet experiments have shown that infants using them sit and crawl one month after those who do not use them, begin to walk two months later, and score lower in mental tests. The walkers are thought to restrict the ability to explore and interact with the infant’s environment. That is certainly consistent with the reports of many creative adults that locomotion promotes reflection. The writer Evan S. Connell once observed that great ideas come to people in transit, especially walking; Joyce Carol Oates has celebrated the stimulation of running and walking, citing Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau, and Dickens.15

  In adults, the range of walking styles has a history that would have fascinated Mauss. In ancient Greece, bold steps were associated with warriors and rulers. In Homer’s epics, Ajax, Odysseus, and other heroes move “with long strides.” (Females, women and goddesses alike, take
dainty steps.) For the Athenians of the fifth century B.C., the waning of aristocratic power brought a new and more moderate male ideal, neither swaggering nor timid but graceful and dignified. The freeborn man of leisure moved calmly. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle observes that the megalopsychos, the great-souled man, moves unhurriedly. Deliberate walking was the mark of leisured men also for the Romans. Strides were broad and both feet probably remained on the ground for longer intervals than they do now. In Roman comedy, slaves ran about, possibly in a scrambling, Keystone Kops fashion. The American orthopedist Steele F. Stewart recalled that the norm for himself and other presumably middle- and upper-class children about a hundred years ago was a “mild Chaplinesque shuffling gait.” It might have been a reaction to the clomping, clodhopping stride of assertive lower-class youth, but we can’t know for sure; the body techniques of the poor are even harder to reconstruct than those of the affluent.16

  Westerners and non-Westerners have long noticed each other’s distinctive gaits, not always admiringly. The Bengali Brahmin polymath Nirad Chaudhuri recalled in The Continent of Circe that his Indian contemporaries seemed to move “like swaying trees”; in turn, young and old compatriots mocked Chaudhuri’s walking style, which he learned from the British, shouting “Left-Right!” and “Johnnie Walker!” as he came down the street. (Indeed, the immense success of the international whiskey brand may have owed much to the bold tread of its booted, ruddy-cheeked Regency figurehead and his invocation of masculine ambition and self-assurance.) Until the middle of the nineteenth century, according to the anthropologist Masaichi Nomura, Japanese children learned to walk with the “namba” gait. It can be seen in old woodblock prints. Arm swing was limited, and each arm moved forward with the corresponding leg instead of with the opposite leg, as is usual in both Japan and the West today. To assure a more level platform for archery, some horses were even trained to move namba-style, with right and left legs synchronized. Japanese ethnologist today find a wider variety of gaits than in the West, but note that the Japanese still use less arm motion and that fewer Japanese than Americans or Europeans strike the ground with their heels as opposed to their toes or entire foot surfaces. Another cultural anthropologist, Tim Ingold, has observed that before their country was opened to the West, Japanese children learned to “walk from the knees,” moving the hips as little as possible, whereas European and North American children are trained to “walk from the hips,” maintaining their culture’s prized erect posture by keeping the legs straight. For Ingold, the skill of walking is not just the addition of culture on top of a genetic capacity; it is the result of a developmental program that includes an entire society’s technologies and techniques. For example, traditional Japanese walking gave a good footing on the often uneven local landscape; it was linked with the Japanese method of transporting heavy things by tying them to shoulder-borne poles. Yet the Japanese also have adopted some Western walking techniques with delight. An American named Frances Caldwell Macauley is said to have introduced skipping to Japan in the late nineteenth century, when she demonstrated it to her class of prospective kindergarten teachers in Hiroshima. It spread so fast that she soon saw an aged couple skipping down the street. In Chapter Three we will see that even in our own times, Japan’s distinctive footwear has continued to influence gait.17

  Some traditional walking techniques, long considered merely exotic, are biomechanically stunning. Women of the Kikuyu and Luo tribes of Africa, according to an international team of scientists who studied their performance, can carry up to a fifth of their body weight balanced on their heads at no additional metabolic cost—in energetic terms, for nothing. With heavier loads, up to 70 percent of body weight, their method is still more efficient than a military backpack. In our normal gait, the body acts as an inverted pendulum, regularly converting potential energy to kinetic energy and back, with the foot as the pivot and the body itself as a moving bob. Somehow the women are able to move so that a moderate weight makes the transfer of energy more efficient, canceling out the extra energetic cost of moving the weight. Sherpas have a similar load-bearing style especially suited for heavier weights. It was not until the year 2000 that a new computer program showed how potential and kinetic energy were exchanged in the African women’s walk. Still unknown is how certain Africans, Nepalese, and other peoples around the world acquire this skill, possibly in childhood.18

  Mauss’s insights into body technique can be extended well beyond gait and gesture to technological and medical procedures. When Mauss first published his study, he noted that French telephone linemen were still using only crampons to climb poles. Only a year or two later did they begin wearing belts that looped around the poles, a method Mauss believed was in universal use among “so-called primitives.” The Greeks and Romans treated burns effectively with cold water, yet for thousands of years doctors were taught to use oils instead (or sometimes simply to apply bandages), especially after the introduction of petroleum jelly in the late nineteenth century, a technology that actually set back burn treatment. Only in 1953 did a Los Angeles surgeon, Alexander G. Schulman, impulsively plunge his own grease-burned arm into a tub of cold water and discover that after an hour he could remove it with little pain. His further research and publications brought back a technique abandoned for over a millennium.19

  Other doctors of our own time have discovered apparently original techniques that needed no medical theory of technology. Consider the Heimlich maneuver. Because choking fatalities have been documented at least to the time of Emperor Claudius, and because airway obstruction can be fatal in five or six minutes, it is remarkable how long it took physicians to develop a standard emergency technique. Well into the 1980s, for example, the American Red Cross still recommended slapping the victim’s back—probably a less effective treatment than the medieval method of rolling him or her over a barrel. It was a single Cincinnati physician, Dr. Henry Heimlich, who in 1974 proposed that the best way to dislodge food from the airway is to compress the diaphragm by standing behind the victim, placing a fist between the navel and the rib cage, and jerking it upward with both arms. The back slap, he maintained, could easily lodge food more deeply in the throat. While the Red Cross and the American Medical Association continued to recommend back slaps as a first resort (at least until the then Surgeon-General C. Everett Koop took Dr. Heimlich’s side in 1985), the procedure was estimated to have saved more than 9,000 lives in its first decade and 20,000 by 1990. By the mid-1990s, it was credited with 4,000 to 5,000 rescues annually.20

  The Heimlich maneuver is pure technique. It needs no medication or apparatus; the inventor decided against using special hardware because precious minutes would be lost in deploying it. (After World War II, Heimlich had developed and patented a now-standard chest drainage valve, for treatment of collapsed lungs, from a 25-cent rubber toy that sounded Bronx cheers.) Yet the method is simple enough that many people who have used it successfully probably have had no more training than seeing a demonstration on television or on a restaurant poster. Much of its power comes from the fact that in a public setting, at least one or two onlookers are likely to be familiar with it. Victims can apply it to themselves, and the method can be modified for very large people, pregnant women, and unconscious people. A four-year-old boy used it to rescue his two-year-old brother.21

  Mauss’s ethnological range as an anthropologist seemed a distraction to Ellul, but it had an important basis that Ellul overlooked. The industrial and postindustrial worlds have no monopoly on technique. A novice computer user can locate and order a set of stainless steel knives on the World Wide Web in ten minutes, but it takes a five-year apprenticeship to become an accomplished maker of stone axes and arrowheads. Australian Aboriginal throwing sticks repay aerodynamic study. Western troops using powerful microprocessor gear are also trained in martial arts techniques developed with no electronic assistance. In fact, the machine sometimes can be the enemy of sophistication in the execution of technique: the historian of technology A
rnold Pacey has observed that in the nineteenth century, traditional Indian hand looms looked crude to Western observers but (in the hands of local artisans) produced far better cloth than the output of the massive, beautifully machined British power looms. Likewise, it was difficult to equal the better grades of handmade Japanese paper.22

  AUTOMATION AND THE REVENGE OF TECHNIQUE

  Is skill necessary? Should it be? We are constantly reminded first of how everything has become so much easier to use, and second of how life has grown more complex and requires more education.

  The cognitive psychologist and computer scientist Donald Norman has observed that many of today’s familiar things required surprising degrees of skill in their early years. One early manual cautioned: “The use of the Phonograph must be learned.… [One needs] a few days to learn everything about it and only a few weeks’ practice to acquire all the dexterity in its use.” Users of early tube radios had to master separate processes of intercepting, tuning, detecting, amplifying, and reproducing. Setting up the wiring and tube(s) alone could take a dozen or more steps. Early automobiles required potentially dangerous hand cranking and long-vanished adjustments like the choke. Photographers before George Eastman needed to learn to use some of the most toxic chemicals known.23

  Other technologies follow a path from minimal to complex technique and back again. Late-nineteenth-century telegraphers could recognize each other by individual styles (the phrase “smooth operator” may have originated in their milieu), and the beautiful keys they used can still be admired in museums. But the telephone and automatic keyboarding equipment ultimately destroyed their culture, as we will see in Chapter Eight. The first telephones, in turn, needed cranking like the first automobiles, but had an early form of voice recognition—a human operator. The dial handsets that succeeded them had to be rotated smoothly and released when the finger reached the stop. In fact, AT&T delayed the dial’s introduction to the Bell System until 1937, claiming it was too hard to use. (And subscribers had to learn to release their fingers at the stop and not try to force the dial back to speed up the process.) Now buttons with tones are almost universal; telephones, like toasters, hardly need instructions.24