Touch of a Button: Long-Distance Transmission, Communication, and Control at World's Fairs

Abstract

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.

Haptic media studies

“…Building upon her previous historical work on the cultural status of the push-button (Plotnick, 2012a(Plotnick, , 2012b, Rachel Plotnick's "Force, flatness and touch without feeling: Thinking historically about haptics and buttons" examines the dematerialization of the electric push-button, accomplished by touchscreen interfaces for mobile communication, and its rematerialization in the form of the visual touchscreen icon, activated by contact between the user's finger and the electrocapacitive screen. Taking the initial deployment of electric push-buttons in the late 19th century as her starting point, Plotnick's genealogy shows how early push-buttons prompted a moral panic about the potential deskilling and dehumanizing effects of automation.…”

Making touch analog: The prospects and perils of a haptic media studies

“…We should launch, to borrow Gault and Geldard’s phrasing, a “sustained attack” on touch media aimed broadly at investigating the various attempts, successful and unsuccessful, at folding touch into the mediated sensorium. In its ideal form, this attack will involve a wide range of methods and approaches, including further historical and archaeological investigations (see, for example, Plotnick, 2013; Strauven, 2012), ethnographic study (as in Classen, 2012; Richardson & Hjorth, 2017), formal analysis (e.g. the discussion of a formal criteria for tactile aesthetics in Gallace and Spence, 2011), political economy, science and technology studies work on engineering practice (Bardini, 2000), cross-cultural comparisons of media touch, platform studies approaches to haptics hardware and software, disability studies treatments of touch as an ameliorative sense (Goggin, this volume; Mills, 2011; Paterson, 2016), and potentially the emergence of something new, rising in response to touch’s unique complexity and multiplicity.…”

“…Because much of academic game studies was built on a scaffolding provided by media studies, these efforts by game scholars have lacked a historical framework for understanding the intertwined material, cultural, economic, and technical lineages gamic touch is bound up in. A cultural history of the game controller, for example, can only go so far without having a cultural history of the push-button (of the sort provided by Plotnick, 2012Plotnick, , 2013 to build upon. Without such an anchoring-without a comprehensive account of touch media that it can layer considerations of more recent developments onto-game scholars suture a history of touch media together haphazardly, from scattered bits of cloth, obscuring the continuity between industrial design practices that underpin keyboards and game controllers alike.…”

Embodied Reading: The Graphic Novel, Perception, and Memory

“…Such an emphasis on the continuum of emerging practices characterizes various studies on the archeology of longdistance connectivity, such as a recent study of the opening ceremonies of world's fairs(Plotnick 2013). Attention to these archeologies and gradual adjustments softens the analog/digital border by demonstrating that re-learning what it means for bodies to assert themselves at a distance through touch is not new.…”