This article uses the case of electric push buttons to argue for more systematic scholarly attention to user interfaces as objects of historical study. Between 1880 and 1923, push buttons diffused rapidly as switches for controlling domestic devices ranging from bells to lights. In a first stage from approximately 1880 to 1915, historical actors employed strategies to make electricity intelligible to and safe for consumers: some advanced a view of buttons as technical mechanisms that laypersons should know how to construct and deconstruct; others propagated a vision of buttons as mediums for using electricity without thought or effort. In a second phase after 1915, when many individuals had come to take push-button interfaces for granted, the electrical industry endeavored to undo this reification by revealing technical processes behind buttons. The article investigates how varying pedagogical models factored into social, cultural and political negotiations around electricity, consumption and everyday practices.
In recent years, concerns have cropped up about the disappearance of analog buttons in favor of flat, slick touchscreens that ask little from their users’ fingers beyond swipes, touches, and taps. This form of interfacing has generated concerns both about usability and about how users relate tactilely and affectively with digital media. This article suggests that worries about these discursive and material shifts related to finger force and flat design continue a conversation begun >100 years ago when the very concept of a “button” was new. Stitching together past and present, this study identifies a persistent struggle to make sense of how humans touch and feel machines, with questions about user agency, labor, individuality, and authentic engagement coming to the fore. Additionally, it makes a case for encouraging scholars to work at the intersection of history and haptic media systems.
This paper investigates the controversy surrounding the systems approach in medicine, contributing to the body of literature on systems and information technology in civilian contexts. Specifically, the paper follows the design and implementation of a hospital information system at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, California, in the 1960s and 1970s. The case study suggests that while many considered "people problems"like healthcare too complex for the systems approach, in fact it could have positive results if system engineers could translate social concerns about medicine into business and organizational strategies. This paper identifies the ways systems designers approached an organization characterized by autonomy rather than collaboration, craft rather than science, and charity rather than business, and helped to redefine that organization as one that emphasized rationality, efficiency, and the coexistence of man and machine.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, opening ceremonies of world's fairs were routinely consummated with a ''touch of a button'' on an ordinary telegraph. Yet in a striking shift from co-located events, United States presidents began triggering these ceremonies, as well as machines, fountains, and fairground lights, from a distance in early experiments with teleoperation. This article interrogates how media discourses framed and interpreted long-distance acts for readers, with particular emphasis on how these narratives imagined touch was transmitted*and communicated*through wires. It calls first for increased scholarly attention to the ways that bodies assert themselves through acts of long-distance connectivity, past and present; and second, for the creation of a robust cultural history that examines precursors to teleoperation and telepresence within the broader historiography of communication and media.
In recent years, scholars have turned their attention to the nexus of mobility, space, and communication practices. At the same time, historians of information and communication technologies (ICTs) have amassed a large body of literature on the history of typewriters and their contribution to gendered office work. To date, however, these two strains have yet to converge. This article thus examines intersections between typewriting, gender, and mobility, focusing on the case of portable typewriters to investigate users’ “differential” mobilities before World War II in the United States. In this regard, it reconceives of typewriters as fluid historical objects defined significantly by their social contexts. It calls upon scholars to expand their characterizations of typing beyond thinking only of it as an immobile, desk-based practice and as “women’s work.” Instead, it draws attention to itinerant male typists as an early class of portable typewriter users who could (and were encouraged to) travel with a typewriter in tow. More broadly, the article also contributes to understandings of mobile media histories beyond mobile phones by demonstrating similar concerns related to portability, usability, and ergonomics in the early 20th century.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.