Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity

by Edward Tenner

  In learning new body skills, we have sometimes neglected others. Scores of resting positions known to anthropologists are being replaced by a single style of sitting; humanity has been losing not only languages but body techniques. Infant feeders compete with the emotional and physiological rewards of nursing. Sneakers assist fitness programs, but some may interfere with older people’s sense of balance. The reclining chair, originally sold partly as a health device, has become an emblem of the dangers of sedentary living. The piano’s high plateau of development in the nineteenth century prepared the way for the player piano and ultimately for recorded music. Typewriter and computer keyboards have eliminated much of the grind of learning penmanship, but also the pleasure of a personal hand. The growth of public education has been accompanied by an increase of myopia, and of eyeglass wearing. And the helmet can promote as well as ward off danger. While augmenting our powers, these devices increase their power over us.

  One challenge of advanced industrial societies is a degree of standardization that threatens to choke off both new technologies and new techniques. The remedy is a return to the collaboration between user and maker that marked so many of the great innovations, whether the shaping of the classic American fire helmet or the development of the touch method by expert typists and typing teachers. And research even in the most advanced technical processes confirms the importance of users. In the 1980s, the economist Eric von Hippel studied change in high-technology industries such as the manufacture of scientific instruments and semiconductors and the assembly of printed circuit boards. He found that up to 77 percent of innovations were initiated by users and recommended that manufacturers identify and work with a vanguard of “lead users.” We have seen how nineteenth-century musicians worked with piano manufacturers, and how the typewriter entrepreneur James Densmore tested his ideas with the court reporter James O. Clephane. Even rank-and-file operators are able to help modify equipment and systems in the interest of safety and productivity. Cognitive psychologists who study work are rejecting an older model of a single, best set of procedures and learning from the way in which workers modify equipment to help do their jobs better. As Kim J. Vicente puts it, “Workers finish the design.”7

  Design should be not only user-friendly but user-challenging. The piano keyboard is rightly celebrated as an interface manageable for the novice and inexhaustible for the expert. Information interfaces should also invite the beginner while offering the experienced user the chance to develop new techniques rather than attempting to anticipate every desire. Participatory design, introduced by the mathematician and computer scientist Kristen Nygaard, began with Norwegian workers who wanted a say in the development of technology in their industries, but was ultimately embraced by corporations worldwide.8

  The thumb keyboard has a sad aspect, the threat to handwriting traditions, whether Asian or Western. But it also has a positive side as a mark of human resorucefulness. Thus the thumb may be the best symbol for a new technological optimism based on user self-reliance, a proletarian digit resurgent in the digital age. The index finger signifies authority, marking regulations and warnings in texts, wagging and lecturing in person: the Rules. The thumb connotes the practical knowledge men and women have worked out for themselves: the Rules of Thumb. And it represents tacit knowledge, the skills we can’t always explain: as in the Green Thumb. Most of all, when extended in the almost lost art of hitchhiking, the thumb shows the right attitude toward the future, open and cooperative but with a firm sense of direction.

  Notes

  PREFACE

  1. Michael M. Weinstein, “A Test You’re Apt to Flunk,” New York Times, March 28, 1993.

  2. Donald A. Norman, The Psychology of Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).

  3. Dave Duehls, “Fit to Be Tried,” Runner’s World, vol. 28, no. 10 (October 1993), 26–27; Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 16–18; Jerry Fodor, “The Appeal to Tacit Knowledge in Psychological Explanation,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 65, no. 20 (October 24, 1968), 627–28.

  4. Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 290–91; Geoffrey Wolff, The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 52; Ed Dentry, “Hikers Need Lessons in Tying the Knot,” Rocky Mountain News, August 1, 1997; Melvyn P. Cheskin, The Complete Handbook of Athletic Footwear (New York: Fairchild Publications, 1987), 203–4; Joe Ellis, “Lacing Lessons,” Runner’s World, vol. 21, no. 4 (April 1986), 59; Jane E. Brody, “When the Elderly Fall, Shoes May Be to Blame,” New York Times, February 26, 1998; Molly Martin, “Fine-Tuning the Fit: It’s OK to Play with Your Shoelaces,” Seattle Times, March 19, 1995.

  5. Evelyn cited in Susan Swann, Shoes (London: B. T. Batsford, 1982), 20; Suman Bandrapalli, “Where Do Sneakers Come From?” Christian Science Monitor, December 1, 1998; Bill Taylor, “Not Fit to Be Tied,” To r onto Star, February 14, 1998; Lord Baden-Powell of Gilwell, Scouting for Boys (n.p.: Boy Scouts of America, 1946), 223; British army boot lace requirement described by Phillip Nutt, telephone interview, November 15, 1999; Ian Stewart, The Magical Maze (New York: John Wiley, 1997), 198–203.

  6. Helena de Bertodano, “Billionaire Scarred by Poverty,” Sunday Telegraph (London), December 13, 1998; Jeff Meyers, “He Has Become Phantom of Marathons,” Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1990; Patrick Reusse, “Cuba Dumps U.S. in L-o-n-g, B-o-r-i-n-g, Sloppy Game,” Star Tribune (Minneapolis), July 30, 1992.

  7. “‘Miracle’: Rescuer Describes Man Forced to Cut Off Leg,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 23, 1993; Carolyn Hughes Crowley, “College Cribbers,” Washington Post, January 6, 1992.

  8. J. H. Thornton, Textbook of Footwear Materials (London: National Trade Press, 1955), 55–56, 210–14; Jeff Bailey, “Unfit to Be Tied: It Really Isn’t You, It’s Your Shoelaces,” Wall Street Journal, January 28, 1998.

  9. Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 12–23.

  10. Hans Fantel, “Portable CD Players Advance,” New York Times, May 17, 1987; Jon Van, “Teletubby Infatuation Gives Fermilab Inspiration,” Chicago Tribune, September 13, 1999; “Totally Random,” Scientific American, vol. 278, no. 5 (November 1997), 28.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1. Sally Holloway, London’s Noble Fire Brigades (London: Cassell, 1973), 51.

  2. William Booth, “3 Bears Too Clever to Live; At Yosemite, Sharing Human Tastes Can Be Deadly,” Washington Post, December 11, 1997; John J. Fialka, “Yosemite Bears Prefer Toyotas and Hondas for Late-Night Snacks,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 1999.

  3. Sandy Bauers, “Philadelphia’s Simian Version of the Great Escape,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 13, 1999.

  4. Ruben Castaneda, “FBI Probing Canine Unit,” Washington Post, April 4, 1999.

  5. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 42–44, 134.

  6. Ibid., 28.

  7. See William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 126–39; William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 127–29; Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 6–24. John Keegan, in faulting McNeill for presenting the de Gheyn book as a drill book, argued that it is instead “an industrial safety manual” designed to keep musketeers out of each other’s range of fire. But of course it had to be both, even if drill did not include modern cadenced marching. See John Keegan, “Keeping in Time,” Times Literary Supplement, July 12, 1996, 3–4, on which I have also relied for some details of the preparation of Weapon Handling.

  8. David Heathcote, “In Every Home an Architect,” Eye, vol. 8, issue 31 (Spring 1999), 38–39.

  9. Ellul, Technological S
ociety, 13–15.

  10. Marcel Mauss, “Body Techniques,” in Sociology and Psychology: Essays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 95–105.

  11. Ibid., 99.

  12. Ibid., 99–100; H. L. Brock, “The Gentle Art of Walking,” in George D. Trent, ed., The Gentle Art of Walking: A Compilation from the New York Times (New York: Arno Press/Random House, 1971), 1–2.

  13. McNeill, Keeping Together, 1–11; Mauss, “Body Techniques,” 99, 114–15.

  14. On the history of Prussian and German drill, see Mary Mosher Flesher, “Repetitive Order and the Human Walking Apparatus: Prussian Military Science versus the Webers’ Locomotion Research,” Annals of Science, vol. 54, no. 5 (September 1997), 463–87.

  15. Jane E. Brody, “Baby Walkers May Slow Infants’ Development,” New York Times, October 14, 1997; Connell quoted by William Hamilton, Morning Edition, National Public Radio, September 14, 1998; Joyce Carol Oates, “To Invigorate Literary Mind, Start Moving Literary Feet,” New York Times, July 19, 1999.

  16. Flesher, “Repetitive Order,” 468; Jan Bremmer, “Walking, Standing, and Sitting in Ancient Greek Culture,” in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, eds., A Cultural History of Gesture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 16–23; Fritz Graf, “The Gestures of Roman Actors and Orators,” in ibid., 47, 49.

  17. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Continent of Circe (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), 226–27; Nicholas D. Kristof, “Walk This Way, or How the Japanese Kept in Step,” New York Times, April 18, 1999; Tim Ingold, “Situating Action V: The History and Evolution of Body Skills,” Ecological Psychology, vol. 8, no. 2 (1996), 171–82; Steele F. Stewart, “Footgear—Its History, Uses and Abuses,” Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research, vol. 88 (October 1972), 127; Koichi Kishimoto, “Japan Skipped Along to Power—and Owes Debt to Foreigners for It,” Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo), November 5, 1997.

  18. N. C. Heglund et al., “Energy-Saving Gait Mechanics with Head-Supported Loads,” Nature, vol. 375, no. 6526 (May 4, 1995), 52–54; Eugenie Samuel, “Walk Like a Pendulum,” New Scientist, vol. 169, no. 2273 (January 13, 2001), 38.

  19. Mauss, Sociology and Psychology, 116; Thomas V. DiBacco, “Way Cool! Today’s Common Sense Was a Long Time Coming,” Washington Post, November 4, 1997.

  20. Robert McKay, “The Amazing Dr. Henry Heimlich,” Saturday Evening Post, November 1986, 42–45; Candy Purdy, “When People Choke,” Current Health 2, vol. 16, no. 6 (February 1990), 24–25; Fenly [sic], “Simply Brilliant: ‘Maneuver’ Is Just One of His Important Medical Discoveries,” San Diego Union-Tribune, February 12, 1990; Henry Heimlich, “Don’t Slap a Choker on the Back,” New York Times, July 12, 1988; Pamela Warrick, “Heimlich’s Audacious Maneuver,” Los Angeles Times, October 30, 1994.

  21. Fenly, “Simply Brilliant”; Warrick, “Heimlich’s Audacious Maneuver.”

  22. Cathie Viksjo, “Art of Flintknapping Carved in Stone,” Trenton (N.J.) Times, June 12, 1999; Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 166–67.

  23. Donald A. Norman, The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 162, 170–73.

  24. Edwin Gabler, The American Telegrapher: A Social History, 1860–1900 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 79–80, 82–83; Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 48, 155.

  25. Stephanie Faul, “New Directions for Steering,” Car and Road (American Automobile Assn.), September/October 1996, 6–7; Eric C. Evarts, “Buckling Up Isn’t as Easy as It Sounds,” Christian Science Monitor, March 10, 1999.

  26. “Often Outgunned, Police Are Bolstering Firepower,” New York Times, September 27, 1987; “Armed and Unready: City Pays for Failure to Train Officers with Sophisticated Weapon,” Washington Post, November 18, 1998.

  27. Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen, The Springboard in the Pond: An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool, ed. Helen Searing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 27–36.

  28. Charles Sprawson, Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 19–23; van Leeuwen, Springboard in the Pond, 36–39; Cecil M. Colwin, Swimming into the 21st Century (Champaign, Ill.: Leisure Press, 1992), 1–49, 69–73; Frank Litsky, “Allen Stack, 71, a Swimmer Who Broke 6 World Records,” New York Times, September 19, 1999.

  29. James Fallows, “Throwing Like a Girl,”Atlantic Monthly,August 1996, 84; John Thorn and John B. Holway, The Pitcher (New York: Prentice-Hall Press, 1987), 147.

  30. Thorn and Holway, The Pitcher, 4; Mark Heisler, “It Can Be One Pitch from Over,” Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1990.

  31. Mike Marqusee, “Getting Cricket Straight,” New York Review of Books, vol. 44, no. 7 (April 24, 1997), 65.

  32. Thorn and Holway, The Pitcher, 149–54; “Sports,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. (1998), vol. 28, 158–59; Jeff Lyon, “Outer Limits,” Chicago Tribune, October 6, 1991, Good Health Magazine, 14.

  33. Wiebe E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelite, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 30–45, 54–100.

  34. John R. Hale, “The Lost Technology of Ancient Greek Rowing,” Scientific American, vol. 274, no. 5 (May 1996), 82–85.

  35. Neil Wigglesworth, A Social History of English Rowing (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 87–89; Thomas C. Mendenhall, The Harvard-Yale Boat Race, 1852–1924 and the Coming of Sport to the American College (Mystic, Conn.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1993), 47–49, 86; Eric Halladay, Rowing in England: A Social History (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 1990), 204–9; Thomas C. Mendenhall, A Short History of American Rowing (Boston: Charles River Books, n.d.), 29–37.

  36. Ian Fairbairn, ed., Steve Fairbairn on Rowing (London: Nicholas Kaye, 1951), 17–45, 81–85, 93–102; Christopher Dodd, The Story of World Rowing (London: Stanley Paul, 1992), 155–68; Walter Wülfing, “‘Der Ruderprofessor,’” in Hans Lenk, ed., Handlungsmuster Leistungssport: Karl Adam zum Gedenken (Schorndorf, West Germany: Verlag Karl Hofmann, 1977), 20–37.

  37. Nick Evangelista, The Encyclopedia of the Sword (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995), 26, 491–92, 546–47, 233; Marvin Nelson, Winning Fencing (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1975), 4–5.

  38. Evangelista, Encyclopedia of the Sword, 254–55, 208–11.

  39. Ibid., 197–201; Nelson, Winning Fencing, 5, 109–12.

  40. Nelson, Winning Fencing, 111; Evangelista, Encyclopedia of the Sword, 447–48, citing E. D. Morton, Martini A—Z of Fencing (London: Queen Anne Press, 1992).

  41. Jim Gorant, “Hinge Benefits,” Popular Mechanics, vol. 175, no. 2 (February 1998), 52–53; “Gerrit Jan van Ingen Schenau,” San Diego Union-Tribune, April 7, 1999; “Geerit Jan van Ingen Schenau, Dutch Designer of Revolutionary Clap Skate,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 13, 1998. These sources were also used in the following paragraphs.

  42. David Chung, “Slap Skates Just Link in Chain to Faster Times,” Japan Economic Newswire, January 15, 1998.

  43. Ibid.

  44. Amy Shipley, “‘Slapskates’ Melt Records, Anger Purists,” Washington Post, November 30, 1997; Vahe Gregorian, “Clap Skates Don’t Get Applause of All the Skaters,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 9, 1998.

  45. Beverley Smith, “New Technology Creates Icy Feud in Speedskating,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), September 30, 1997.

  46. Thomas C. Kouros, Par Bowling: The Challenge (Palatine, Ill.: Pin-Count Enterprises, 1993), 177.

  47. Weiskopf, Perfect Game, 162–75; Chip Zielke, Revolutions (Matteson, Ill.: Revolutions International, 1995), 28–32; James Brooke, “900 Reasons for Making the Bowlers’ Record Book,” New York Times, February 9, 1997; John Maher, “Spare Change: With High-Tech Bowling Balls, the Premium on Talent Diminishes in the Professional Bowlers,” Austin American-Statesman, July 29, 1995; Dick Evans, “Once Spoiled by Success, Holman Is Starting Over,” Portland Oregonian,
January 30, 1995; Kevin Sherrington, “Bowlers Worry About PBA Tour’s Decline,” Seattle Times, March 12, 1995.

  48. Dan Herbst, “Is Practice a Lost Art?” Bowlers Journal International, vol. 82, no. 6 (June 1995), 80, 84.

  49. Rone Tempest, “China Puts Bowling in New League,” Los Angeles Times, October 5, 1997; Steve James, “The Helicopter Technique: It Isn’t Funny Anymore,” Bowling, vol. 58, no. 3 (December 1991—January 1992), 28–32; Zakri Baharudin, “Taiwan’s Spinning Takes Them Places,” New Straits Times (Malaysia), March 29, 1999; Akirako Yamaguchi, “Taiwanese Bowler Rolls Gold with ‘Helicopter,’” Daily Yomiuri, October 6, 1994; Hildegarde Chambers, “Bowler Aims for World Title,” Calgary Herald, December 10, 1998.

  50. Chris Cooper, “How Much Does a Strike Weigh?” Bowling, vol. 61, no. 3 (December 1994—January 1995), 34–36.

  51. James, “Helicopter Technique,” 32.

  52. David Warsh, “Toward a Better Understanding of Economic Growth,” Boston Globe, August 7, 1994; Paul M. Romer, “Beyond Classical and Keynesian Macro-economic Policy,” Policy Options, July—August 1994, posted at http://www.stanford.edu/~promer; A. Lund, broadcast e-mail message, October 28, 1995, “Feedback on Ratings of Usability Rules of Thumb,” cited in Aaron Marcus, “Graphical User Interfaces,” in Martin G. Helander et al., eds., Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1997), 438.