Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (34 page)

The response of some computer industry leaders to the keyboard’s problems has been the dream of its abolition. When the Macintosh graphic user interface arrived in the
1980s, the mouse at first took over some of the commands of the keyboard, but many users soon clamored for function keys and keyboard shortcuts. In the late 1980s and early 1990s visionaries at Apple and elsewhere called for a new kind of computer that would recognize handwriting on a portable tablet. While the movement ended in a wave of failures, notoriously of the original Apple Newton, pen-based
computing never actually died, and both Apple and Microsoft are doing their best to revive it. Yet the smaller the portable device, the more likely it appears that someone will find a way to plug a portable QWERTY keyboard
into it. Several are available for the Palm Pilot personal digital assistant (PDA). Even graphically oriented Apple included a detachable keyboard with the last version of its
Newton MessagePad—as well as a Unix-based text command option in its latest Macintosh operating system. And PDAs without plug-in keyboards are routinely connected to conventional computers for keyboard-entered data.
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Voice control was as exciting in the late 1990s as handwriting recognition had been ten years earlier, and with similar results: a wave of marketing and financial troubles that
has failed to shake underlying optimism about the technology’s future. While voice recognition software can promote its own overuse injuries, it can now work with natural phrasing and infer spelling from context. But it is unlikely to eliminate the keyboard, because it will still make errors (or users will still fail to enunciate properly), and editing copy orally is even slower and more tedious than
correcting it with a keyboard. Optical character recognition data also need checking and editing. Typing will probably be further reduced in familiar applications in the future, but it will also be extended to new tasks.

A new global keyboard order is emerging. Intensive “production” typing is less necessary because more data arrive already digitized and need only formatting and correction. The
heavy typing that remains can, like the production of keyboards themselves, be outsourced to low-wage countries. Young employees have no fear that typing skills will trap them in dead-end jobs, as used to happen to women. The generation of senior executives who regarded a keyboard near their desk as a breach of caste purity has long retired. Even professions famous for their attachment to real
slate blackboards and hand-lettered transparencies, like pure mathematicians, now are as likely to be typing away like anyone else, thanks to software that sets the most complex equations.

While visionaries still dream of tiny wireless devices, the twenty-first century remains faithful to Sholes’s layout. It replaces the card catalogue in libraries and the posted directory in office buildings.
It controls industrial processes and home entertainment systems. Many people in large cities actually prefer the numerical keypads and monitors of automatic teller machines to human tellers. Public and private dial telephones are rare, keypads almost universal. Scientific pocket calculators sell for less than slide rules ever did, not just for text production and financial analysis but for the control
of everything from industrial processes to entertainment options. Asian countries use combinations of Western keys to form their
own scripts, and a new standard called Unicode lets the keyboard generate every character of each important world language.

Keyboards have become more “universal” than ever imagined by the frenetic pitchmen of the nascent typewriter industry those bold pioneers of high-technology
salesmanship. They have fulfilled the dreams of millions of nineteenth- and earlier-twentieth-century schoolchildren, drastically reducing tedious hours of penmanship practice. But thereby they have also deprived millions of adults of a potentially graceful and satisfying skill, reducing much handwriting to illegible cursive and childlike printing. The neurologist Frank R. Wilson has
argued persuasively that excessive substitution of computer use for manual activities can impoverish childhood. And just as the rivalry of revisionist keyboards helped maintain QWERTY, the division of handwriting advocates into antagonistic cursive and italic camps has inhibited the reintroduction of handwriting lessons in the United States. There are even calls for laptop computers for all students,
as there once were movements to give them typewriters. From the early nineteenth century, the keyboard has been a deliverance for men and women with disabilities, now restoring even speech with voice synthesis. But excessive keyboard use by children has also given them a needless handicap, inability to express themselves rapidly and legibly with a pen or pencil. Researchers of at least one U.S.
university are now developing new generations of secure computer-based tests, convinced that word-processing and electronic mail have made handwriting almost unnatural.
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We have seen that wearing shoes and sitting in chairs puts us on a technological treadmill: enhancing our comfort and expanding our capabilities, these body technologies also increase our dependence on themselves. Handwriting
has become like barefoot walking, satisfying with practice but at first painful to the adult relearner. There has been a cultural ratcheting, too: visual arts, poetry, music, and even intimate personal communications have been subtly influenced by an interface from the counting house. Perhaps the process began when Mark Twain’s friend, the humorist Petroleum V Nasby watched a typewriting demonstration
with Twain in Boston in 1874 and abandoned writing and lecturing to join James Densmore’s marketing organization.
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Twenty years after Nasby’s career change, a typist named Lucy C. Bull published an essay in the
Atlantic Monthly
on the machine’s impact. Her remarks are even more profound today then when she wrote them. The device “which is beginning to supplement the labors of clergymen, lecturers,
and contributors to the magazines” was, after all, a business tool, “constructed almost entirely in accordance with the demands of commerce.” She noted that at least one man had dictated a letter to his fiancée, and that accents and other literary fine points were already in decline. But, most interestingly, she foresaw the universality of the keyboard even before electronics let it overcome its
mechanical limits; she understood that the professional keyboard operator would be unnecessary when all had their own machines. The phrase that she used as her title, melding device and operator, might also be a motto for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: “Being a Typewriter.”
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S
O FAR
, we have considered objects widely supposed to enhance human performance: the bottle to improve infant nutrition (although science later proved otherwise), the sandal and shoe for protection from the hostile surfaces other technology has created (although we now know the case for barefootedness), the office chair and reclining chair for optimal posture
and health (although slouching is still endemic and the recliner has become an emblem of the sedentary life), the keyboard for more efficient production of both sound and text (although both musical and computer keyboards are still far from ideal).

Eyeglasses are like other body technologies in their potentially farreaching, even deforming effects. Just as sitting and keyboard affect posture,
so do spectacles. (In fact, the satirist Barry Humphries, in the person of his character Dame Edna Everage, calls them “face furniture.”) Many people have one ear slightly higher than the other, which tilts their glasses, or a nose that lets the glasses ride downward. Adjustments to compensate for these problems, such as inclining the head sideways or thrusting it forward, and breathing through the
mouth, can lead to headaches, neck, and facial joint pain, according to a rehabilitative medicine specialist. Like footwear, poor vision and spectacles can also change walking patterns. The extremely myopic Friedrich Nietzsche took short, high steps by his fifties to avoid stumbling, and in the nineteenth century there were even attempts to train horses in a fashionable, high-stepping gait by fitting
them with distorting spectacles. (Conversely, some myopic people, unable to recognize friends and acquaintances at a distance by their features, become expert at identifying their unique carriage.)
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Correctly fitted and worn, though, glasses are different from the other technologies we have considered. They are corrections, not deformations or even improvements. Except for certain low-power magnifiers
that work like eyeglasses, the optics that extend our senses—binoculars, telescopes, microscopes—are rarely attached to the body. Eyeglass wearers, an ever-increasing part of humanity, become different from other people in appearance so that their performance can be as similar as possible. And despite their corrective purpose, glasses can also affect the body and spirit as well as the face
of the wearer, becoming a mask difficult to separate from the person. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (a well-trained general practitioner and failed ophthalmologist) had Sherlock Holmes observe in “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-nez”: “It would be difficult to name any articles which afford a finer field for inference than a pair of glasses.” And toward the end of the story the killer’s appearance confirms
Holmes’s deductions from the glasses: thick nose, close-set eyes, peering expression, rounded shoulders. In fact, a pair of eyeglasses can evoke not just a face but a realm of speech and gesture. The elaborate clothing and makeup Humphries wears in character as Dame Edna are not the key to his performance. “As soon as the glasses go on, I cease to be myself,” he declared to one writer.
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Optics
are like the seating we have studied, growing in importance with the spread of information and literacy. We think of reading, like shoes and chairs, as one of the unquestioned goods of civilization. But just as we come to depend on footwear and seating, as we lose the natural protective layers of callused skin on our soles and cease to be able to sit comfortably on the ground, we also lose the unmediated
contact with the world that hunter-gatherers enjoy. At least in later life, nearly all of us need artificial aids, and society depends economically on their existence. The type sizes of many of our printed materials presuppose that large numbers of readers will use spectacles to read them. The insides of both mechanical and electronic devices have parts that require some degree of magnification.
And while computer monitors can magnify type as conventional printed materials never could, it is also true that new generations of handheld mobile devices set severe limits on the size of type. So eyeglasses, like keyboards, are essential interfaces of the body as well as the mind with the environment.

Spectacles might have been invented two thousand or more years ago, when the principles of
lenses were already known. It took a certain kind of society that emerged in medieval Europe to create the conditions for their spread. Respected and mocked for centuries, glasses express both deficiency and superiority. Our techniques of gathering and spreading information
rely on the technology of optics, and we are still not completely at ease with the consequences.

The Garden of Eden myth
is more than a Judeo-Christian fable. It is also a metaphor of the surprisingly healthy and leisurely lifestyle of preagricultural antiquity, or at least parts of it, that archaeologists and anthropologists have been discovering. Our Paleolithic ancestors were bigger and stronger than we are and had sturdier and healthier teeth. Archaeology can tell us little directly about their vision, but there
is reason to think it was acute. Their survival would have depended on their ability to recognize game and identify edible plants at a distance, though the lenses of their eyes no doubt hardened like ours, especially after the age of forty, making it more difficult for the ciliary muscle to focus on near objects. But their perceptual world—
Merkwelt
, as the behavioral biologist Jakob von Uexküll
called it—was in the middle range and beyond. And besides, despite their robustness, relatively few survived into their forties.

Whatever their other afflictions, few of our ancestors would have been myopic. Myopia or nearsightedness is the focusing of light in the eye at a point in front of the retina, making far objects indistinct and leading to eye rubbing and squinting. Some people are myopic
at birth, but most cases develop in childhood or early adulthood, when the eyeball begins to elongate before the lens and cornea have grown to focus on it.

Myopia appears to have been rare among hunter-gatherers, to judge from the handful of twentieth-century peoples whose vision has been studied. Australian aborigines have an extremely low rate of myopia, for example, and as a group are mildly
farsighted; even comparing individuals with normal sight, native Australians can see significantly more sharply than Australians of European descent. Almost equally negligible myopia rates have been found on the South Pacific islands of Vanuatu, Bougainville, and Malaita; among the forest people of Gabon; and among the Eskimos of Greenland. Among Alaskan Eskimo families studied in the 1960s, adults
who had always lived traditionally had a 2 percent myopia rate, which increased in their schooled offspring to more than 50 percent. Not that illiteracy guarantees good eyesight. Some old agricultural societies without mass education, like World War I—era Egypt, have been relatively myopic. And the Egyptians’ neighbors, migratory Nubians and Bedouins who included many devout readers of the Koran,
were rarely nearsighted. One fact remains: no hunter-gatherer people has ever been shown to have a high rate of myopia. While the studies are few and methodologically imperfect, they suggest that some ways of life—especially
urban and literate ones—relax the pressure that usually selects for good eyesight.
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Why do the children of visually acute hunter-gatherers begin to show higher rates of myopia
soon after they receive a Western education? One recent study suggests that refined starches introduced by Europeans may raise insulin levels, changing the developmental program of children’s eyes. Whatever other genetic or physiological influences shape myopia, reading and other detailed visual work probably play some part, though specialists still do not understand the mechanism. Reading—perhaps
especially reading of finely detailed ideographic scripts like Chinese and Japanese—involves the central area of the retina to the exclusion of other neurons. The resulting blur in the rest of the visual field, unmarked by the reader, may release neuropeptides that overstimulate the elongation of the eye. The eye may also elongate in keeping close work in focus. This frequent explanation is
plausible but incomplete. It does not suggest why the lengthening is not equalized by long-distance focusing that should tend to shorten the eye.
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Whatever the details of the mechanism, the technology of writing and the technique of reading appear in most societies to have an unintended and unwanted influence on the developing body. In our efforts to see the fine print of life more distinctly,
whether legal niceties or technical drawings, literate peoples are apt to blur the big picture. And indeed, cross-cultural psychologists have found that urban living leads to a superior grasp of detail at the expense of the ability to detect larger patterns. Culture remakes our perceptions as well as our visual apparatus. A spectacle case belongs to the technological baggage of modernization.
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Every literate society has two overlapping populations whose vision needs correction. One is the myopes, who are usually comfortable at reading distance but whose longer sight is indistinct. The other group is the presbyopes, men and women whose eye muscles can no longer focus their lenses properly for near work and require artificial refraction. Almost all men and women over
forty need some assistance, yet it took a surprisingly long time after the introduction of writing for humanity to use magnifiers routinely for reading, let alone wear eyeglasses. Artisans and artists in the ancient Mediterranean and early medieval Europe must have used magnifiers on occasion. Jay M. Enoch, a professor of physiological optics and
historian of technology, has found a number of
objects that were fashioned with converging plano-convex lenses to allow extraordinary detail to be viewed with the naked eye. A bull’s-head rhyton (drinking vessel) of about 1550–1500
B.C.
has a minute silhouette of a human head visible through the “cornea” of one eye. Greek rings of 350–300
B.C.
have gold-foil images that appear to float in the clear glass that covers them. And a supposed splinter
of the True Cross in Rheims is sandwiched between two concave magnifying jewels.
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The Romans were familiar with the working of rock crystal (clear quartz) and, later, glass. Greeks and Romans made double convex burning glasses, already mentioned in Aristophanes’
Clouds
. But they never developed eyeglasses. As the classical scholar Nicholas Horsfall has observed, they had expert assistance from
literate slaves and freedmen: a
lector
read texts, and a
scriba
or
notarius
(secretary or stenographer) took dictation. Roman winters were dark and the lamps crude and smoky by modern standards; Romans also suffered from frequent eye inflammations. Yet the elite could enjoy their own form of mobile voice recognition and word processing, dictating while walking, traveling, or in the baths. Readers
and secretaries were part of the entourage of leading political figures, on call around the clock but rarely acknowledged as individuals. The church fathers maintained this pattern, turning to monks and devout young laymen.
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Most specialists believe that medieval as well as ancient craftsmen used magnifiers for their fine work. Even today, the detail needs enlargement to be fully appreciated
even by the keenest-eyed museumgoer. It is true that none of the many images of medieval scribes in their workshops illustrates such an instrument. Some believe that very myopic young workers might have needed no optical aid, but so many exquisitely detailed masterpieces could hardly have been journeymen’s work. Lenses in the form of polished rock crystal and other minerals, or concave mirrors, were
probably trade secrets. Artists’ use of devices remains controversial even in the generally technophile twenty-first century, as painters and scholars debate whether such giants as Caravaggio, Vermeer, and Ingres employed imaging devices like the camera lucida. An illuminator known to work with a crystal or gemstone might not have been disgraced in the eyes of royal and aristocratic patrons, but
his work could have seemed less masterly and less valuable.

Medieval philosophers were excited about the principle that refraction, the bending of light, could make objects appear larger, but until the later thirteenth century they were probably unaware of the lenses their contemporaries
were using. It was then that the friar Roger Bacon first wrote of transparent materials like crystal or glass
held above text by those with vision problems. But even Bacon did not analyze the design of corrective optics and was probably thinking only of the magnifiers already in use.

It was not natural philosophers like Bacon who made the first eyeglasses but unnamed artisans in Pisa and Venice, and possibly in France and Germany as well. In 1306, a monk named Giordano da Rivalto, of Pisa,
praised eyeglasses in a sermon delivered in Florence, declaring that their manufacture, “one of the best arts and most necessary that the world has,” originated twenty years earlier with an unnamed man he knew, probably a Pisan craftsman. True to the practical side that we have noted in medieval religion, another monk in the same Dominican monastery was able to duplicate the secret process by 1313.
Even in Venice, where the crystal-workers’ guild had been producing crystal magnifiers, the Pisan term
occhiali
(first documented in Giordano da Rivalto’s sermon and still the Italian word for eyeglasses) prevailed.
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