Complex Numbers

That Newfangled Junk

By coincidence, today's article also talks about a late nineteenth century innovation, one which was apparently met with some pushback.

    When the Push Button Was New, People Were Freaked  
The mundane interface between human and machine caused social anxiety in the late nineteenth century.

Pun, of course, intended.

The electric push button, the now mundane-seeming interface between human and machine, was originally a spark for wonder, anxiety, and social transformation.

Because it's obviously sorcery.

As media studies scholar Rachel Plotnick details, people worried that the electric push button would make human skills atrophy. They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.”

Does this sound to you like almost every other complaint about new technology and/or ways of doing things? It does to me.

Right after we invented fire, a bunch of skin-wearing humans probably freaked out, too. "What is this 'starting a fire' bullshit? In MY day, we'd steal it from a burning tree after the gods smote it with lightning, as they intended. This is going to make people lazy and entitled, you mark my words."

“Some believed that users should creatively interrogate these objects and learn how they worked as part of a broader electrical education,” Plotnick explains. “Others…suggested that pushing buttons could help users to avoid complicated and laborious technological experiences. These approaches reflected different groups’ attempts at managing fears of electricity.”

One thing I remember about the show The Jetsons from when I was a kid (haven't seen it since) was that George Jetson's job in our utopian Eloi-like future involved pushing seemingly random buttons all day, to the point that his finger would cartoonishly swell and throb in pain.

Well. At least they got that part right (he typed on his computer keyboard). Still no flying cars, though. By the time we get those, it's all going to be touchscreens and voice interfaces, both of which are going to make people lazy and entitled, you mark my words.

Electric push buttons, essentially on/off switches for circuits, came on the market in the 1880s.

For those of you who didn't bother with yesterday's entry, that's more than a decade after the invention of blue jeans.

The word “button” itself comes from the French bouton, meaning pimple or projection, and to push or thrust forward.

I don't claim to be an expert in French, but I learned "bouton" to mean like the button on a shirt (or Levis), and that word doesn't look like a verb form to me. Perhaps archaic French; je ne sais pas.

Those who promoted electricity and sold electrical devices, however, wanted push-button interfaces to be “simplistic and worry-free.” They thought the world needed less thinking though and tinkering, and more automatic action. “You press the button, we do the rest”—the Eastman Company’s famous slogan for Kodak cameras—could be taken as the slogan for an entire way of life.

Like I said, lazy.

What I didn't say (at least not yet in this entry) is that I consider that a good thing. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but laziness is the milkman. Bill Gates supposedly once said that he hires lazy people because they'll figure out the most efficient way to do things. I have no idea if that quote is correctly attributed, but someone said (or wrote) it, and it rings true.

Ultimately, the idea that electricity was a kind of magic would triumph over a more hands-on, demystifying approach.

Guilty. For all I understand it on anything but the most theoretical level, it might as well be sorcery. Yes, I'm an engineer by training. No, that training didn't include electrical.

Plotnick quotes an educator and activist from 1916 lamenting that pushing a button “seems to relieve one of any necessity for responsibility about what goes on behind the button.”

Yep. History echoes once again.

150 years later, we equate button-pushing with "easy." That's the whole point of Staples' ad campaign (from a while back; I have no idea if it's still going on.) But I don't think they invented the concept; they just took an existing concept ("at the push of a button") and made it into a marketing gimmick.

No... technology is supposed to make our lives easier, make things more convenient. That's what it's for.

Kids these days with their simple-to-use devices, I'm telling you, mark my words...