I’ve always been attracted to picking apart “taken-for-granted” things and wondered how ubiquitous and mundane technologies have become that way. What were they before they were ordinary? When I started researching and writing about push buttons, I discovered that the interfaces right under our fingers have a long and complex history. I loved reading about a time when pushing a button was both a novelty and a danger, and these recommended books similarly reframe familiar technologies as anything but familiar. I hope that these books will add a little bit of strangeness to the every day, just like they did for me!
I wrote...
Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing
Push a button and turn on the television; tap a button and get a ride; click a button and “like” something. A finger’s touch can set an appliance, car, or system in motion, even if the user doesn't understand the underlying mechanisms or algorithms. How did buttons become so ubiquitous? Why do people love, loathe, and fear them?
Today's push-button society only makes sense when examining how buttons have been made, distributed, used, rejected, and refashioned throughout history. Between 1880 and 1925, when “technologies of the hand” proliferated (including typewriters, telegraphs, and fingerprinting), button pushing became a means for digital command, which promised effortless, discreet, and fool-proof control that underlies the logic of today’s computers, smartphones, and AI devices.
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.
Henry Petroski traces the origins of the pencil back to ancient Greece and Rome, writes factually and charmingly about its development over the centuries and around the world, and shows what the pencil can teach us about engineering and technology today.
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.
A “timely, informative, and fascinating” study of 8 inventions—and how they shaped our world—with “totally compelling” insights on little-known inventors throughout history (Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction)
In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez examines 8 inventions and reveals how they shaped the human experience:
• Clocks • Steel rails • Copper communication cables • Photographic film • Light bulbs • Hard disks • Scientific labware • Silicon chips
Ramirez tells the stories of the woman who sold time, the inventor who inspired Edison, and the hotheaded undertaker whose invention pointed the…
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.
Paper Knowledge is a remarkable book about the mundane: the library card, the promissory note, the movie ticket, the PDF (Portable Document Format). It is a media history of the document. Drawing examples from the 1870s, the 1930s, the 1960s, and today, Lisa Gitelman thinks across the media that the document form has come to inhabit over the last 150 years, including letterpress printing, typing and carbon paper, mimeograph, microfilm, offset printing, photocopying, and scanning. Whether examining late nineteenth century commercial, or "job" printing, or the Xerox machine and the role of reproduction in our understanding of the document, Gitelman…
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.
The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with information
The ubiquity of the filing cabinet in the twentieth-century office space, along with its noticeable absence of style, has obscured its transformative role in the histories of both information technology and work. In the first in-depth history of this neglected artifact, Craig Robertson explores how the filing cabinet profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used.
Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet was a result of the nineteenth-century faith in efficiency. Previously, paper records were arranged…
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.
MP3: The Meaning of a Format recounts the hundred-year history of the world's most common format for recorded audio. Understanding the historical meaning of the MP3 format entails rethinking the place of digital technologies in the larger universe of twentieth-century communication history, from hearing research conducted by the telephone industry in the 1910s, through the mid-century development of perceptual coding (the technology underlying the MP3), to the format's promiscuous social life since the mid 1990s.
MP3s are products of compression, a process that removes sounds unlikely to be heard from recordings. Although media history is often characterized as a progression…
I have spent my entire professional life quietly patrolling the frontiers of understanding human consciousness. I was an early adopter in the burgeoning field of biofeedback, then neurofeedback and neuroscience, plus theory and practices of humanistic and transpersonal psychology, plus steeping myself in systems theory as a context for all these other fields of focus. I hold a MS in psychology from San Francisco State University and a PhD from Saybrook Institute. I live in Mount Shasta CA with Molly, my life partner for over 60 years. We have two sons and two grandchildren.
In this thoroughly researched and exquisitely crafted treatise, Jim Brown synthesizes the newest understandings in neuroscience, developmental psychology, and dynamical systems theory for educators and others committed to nurturing human development.
He explains complex concepts in down-to-earth terms, suggesting how these understandings can transform education to engender optimal learning and intelligence. He explores the nature of consciousness, intelligence, and mind.
Brown then offers a model of optimal human learning through lifelong brain development within a supportive culture--drawing on the work of Piaget, Erickson, Maslow, Kohlberg, and Steiner--and how that work is being vastly expanded by neuroscience and dynamical systems thinking.
Mindleap: A Fresh View of Education Empowered by Neuroscience and Systems Thinking
In this thoroughly-researched and exquisitely crafted treatise, Jim Brown synthesizes the newest understandings in neuroscience, developmental psychology, and dynamical systems theory for educators and others committed to nurturing human development. He explains complex concepts in down-to-earth terms, suggesting how these understandings can transform education to truly engender optimal learning and intelligence. He explores the nature of consciousness, intelligence, and mind. Brown then offers a model of optimal human learning through life-long brain development within a supportive culture--drawing on the work of Piaget, Erickson, Maslow, Kohlberg, and Steiner--and how that work is being vastly expanded by neuroscience and dynamical systems thinking.
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