The best books about technologies that seem boring but aren’t

I opened up this book as a skeptic–how interesting could a history of this ubiquitous writing tool be? However, I quickly ate my words (a fitting metaphor for such a book) after diving into Henry Petroski’s meticulously researched and easy to read tale of how a common thing becomes common in the first place.

While the book is a study in engineering, it’s also a story of people who doodle, think, design, and imagine. Petroski taught me that much as we live in a digital age, we’re indebted to the simple and impressively designed artifacts that stick around century after century. 

Ainissa Ramirez is a scientist and a storyteller, and from page one of this book, I found myself transfixed by her ability to make complex things comprehensible. From the springs that make clocks work and the carbon filaments that help us see to the electrons in glass that now power computers and smartphones, Ramirez taught me how much matter matters in understanding technological developments of the present moment.

My favorite part of the book is her writing style, as she begins each chapter with an inviting anecdote, like how Abraham Lincoln’s body was carried in a funeral rail car made possible by the steel in train tracks. 

We live in a world of documents caught between new and old, between paper and bits–from library cards and movie tickets to PDFs–and media historian Lisa Gitelman explains why the “document” itself is so critical a category in modern society. Medical facilities, schools, governments, and prisons all require documentation, so this book is particularly useful in thinking about how societies organize around knowledge infrastructures and artifacts.

I marvel at how the book (and all of Gitelman’s work) is able to move so facilely between different historical moments and objects, weaving them together into a tapestry that is more than the sum of its parts. While we might think of “media” as radio, TV, newspapers, or the internet, Gitelman helped me understand that media is so much more.

Do filing cabinets matter anymore? I asked myself this question as I popped open Robertson’s book, quickly to find that these storage cabinets have a tremendous amount to teach us about “information” in the present moment.

Robertson demonstrates how the filing cabinet, through its vertical storage, became a “skyscraper” for the office, and this spatial arrangement not only influenced what information was but how it should be organized.

I love the fantastic archival images in the book, which made a humble and even “boring” technology incredibly relatable and vivid. At the same time, I appreciated Robertson’s ruminations on gender and the file clerk; it’s not just what gets filed, he convinced me, but also who does the filing.

MP3s are a curious thing; they’re of the digital moment, and yet they’re already old-fashioned, given that we’re much more likely to stream than to save.

Jonathan Sterne’s book is one that I come back to over and over again because he impressed upon me the importance of thinking about format when trying to understand media. He explains the MP3’s “promiscuous social life” since the 1990s as it has moved between corporations and individuals, as a commodity sold and also one pirated and shared peer-to-peer.

As a curious student of musical culture, I’m intrigued by the seismic shifts that have occurred in the last decade, and Sterne reminded me that how music moves depends significantly on the form it takes in the first place.