Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (4 page)

Other technologies follow a path from minimal to complex technique and back again. Late-nineteenth-century telegraphers could recognize each other by individual styles (the phrase “smooth operator” may have originated in their milieu), and the beautiful keys they used can still be admired in museums. But the telephone and automatic keyboarding equipment
ultimately destroyed their culture, as we will see in Chapter Eight. The first telephones, in turn, needed cranking like the first automobiles, but had an early form of voice recognition—a human operator. The dial handsets that succeeded them had to be rotated smoothly and released when the finger reached the stop. In fact, AT&T delayed the dial’s introduction to the Bell System until 1937, claiming
it was too hard to use. (And subscribers had to learn to release their fingers at the stop and not try to force the dial back to speed up the process.) Now buttons with tones are almost universal; telephones, like toasters, hardly need instructions.
²⁴

Straight razors are still made, and enthusiasts may still compare them favorably with the latest triple-cutter disposable blades, but few barbers
use them. Consumers who complain about programming a videocassette recorder probably have never tried to thread a reel-to-reel tape recorder, let alone a film projector, and cable television even eliminates the skill once needed to orient antennas. Our objects seem to be modularized in cassettes and sealed, swappable assemblies. Indeed, this was the appeal of the original Kodak Brownie camera in
1900. The slogan “You push a button, we do the rest” made Eastman’s fortune.

But is technique really abolished, or only relocated? Think again of the automobile. Fewer American drivers are buying manual transmissions, not only because new automatic designs are smoother and more economical than their predecessors, but because motorists have embraced a new and potentially hazardous technique: traveling
while cradling and speaking into a portable cellular telephone. An air bag seems to be the ultimate passive device, but even it has implications for how we use our bodies. The American Automobile Association now recommends keeping hands on the steering wheel at the 9 and 3 o’clock positions, or even as low as 7 and 5 o’clock, instead of at the former driver-education-course standard of 10
and 2 o’clock, to reduce the risk that the air bag will burn the driver’s hands or propel them up at the face. Advocates also say the new grip allows a fuller rotation of the wheel in emergencies without removing the hands. And some experts now believe that traditional hand-over-hand technique, while efficient in tight cornering, not only exposes arms to air bag explosions but promotes dangerous
oversteering under stress. Children
in the backseat are to be directed to sit up straight and not lean to the side if their cars are equipped with the new side-impact air bags. And skill is required to install rear children’s seats safely; the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that in 90 percent of cars, either the seat or the child is improperly secured. New
safety devices thus may require us to spend hours changing the very techniques that were once taught for safety, and acquiring entirely new ones.
²⁵

Few drivers receive formal training in emergency handling of their cars, especially in snow and ice, and places for safe practice of these maneuvers are rare. Yet antilock brake systems (ABS), traction control, and other innovations may encourage
drivers to venture out in conditions where these special skills are necessary, even with the new technology. And there is an element of technique even in the use of automatic devices: because ABS is unlikely to be universal in the near future, every driver has to be aware of how to handle a skidding car: the pumping action formerly recommended for the traditional brake, or the steady pressure needed
by ABS. (To make matters still more confusing, it is not clear whether pumping is a more effective way to halt a skid or merely a relic of the days before disk brakes, when fade was a serious problem.)

Making inherently dangerous things easier to use creates other problems. The 9-millimeter pistol shows that simpler construction may demand more skill. In the 1980s, many American police departments
began to replace their service revolvers with these semiautomatic weapons, made by Beretta, Glock, Ruger, and other companies, for more rapid firing against drug dealers’ automatics. Originally temperamental, the semiautomatics now are more reliable and easier to use and maintain than revolvers. But it is precisely this simplicity that makes technique more complex. When the city of Washington,
D.C., adopted the Glock 17 in 1988, officials especially liked the absence of an external safety lock. The Glock 17 has three mechanisms to prevent accidental discharge, but squeezing the trigger releases each of them. One of the internal safeties is intended to add an additional pull on the trigger before firing, but in the streets many officers may activate it early to be ready to fire instantly.
²⁶

The military works hard to prevent premature engagement by achieving “fire discipline.” In Washington, there were over 120 accidental discharges of the new pistols in the first ten years, leading to settlements of over $1.4 million in just three months of 1998 alone. The Glock, according to its many admirers in police circles, is inherently safe. One simply needs special training to know exactly
when to begin fire when the finger
is kept on the trigger. (Because it will fire a round from the chamber even after the magazine has been removed, the Glock 17 also demands more careful maintenance procedures.) The simplicity and ease of firing, then, demand more rather than less training in technique.

Other sophisticated, seemingly transparent technologies also call for unexpected manual skills.
The magnetic-striped MetroCards used by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority must be passed through a slot at subway turnstiles in a firm, fluid, even manner not easy for all riders to master. (Bus fareboxes swallow the card and return it, provided it is inserted in the single correct direction out of four.) A failed “swipe,” as the motion is called, must be repeated at the same
turnstile; otherwise the system temporarily invalidates it. Sometimes several passes are required before the card is read.

In at least one of the advanced research laboratories I have visited, technicians were on call to untangle the serpents’ nests of cords and wires that accumulate behind and beneath equipment. Their specialty has a name, cable management, and pays salaries high enough that
a representative in one laboratory apologized for the mess with the explanation that untangling would have strained the unit’s budget.

At the level of individual users, the mouse was heralded as an unproblematic intuitive device but often demands either reprogramming (for acceleration or double-click speed, for instance) or adjustment of the user’s technique. It clogs readily with dust and only
the most thorough cleaning restores its responsiveness. And some ergonomists believe that, used improperly, it can be a greater health hazard than the keyboard.

Technique has a history even without changes in equipment. It is too bad that Mauss did not pursue his analysis of swimming history, because the sport showed the importance of culture for performance. It was
a kind of aquatic marching, at first taught mainly by military instructors. The breaststroke that Mauss and his contemporaries had learned was favored by European and North American swimming teachers in the nineteenth century despite its obvious disadvantages: as the name implies, the full breadth of the chest pushes through the water, and the arms and legs also increase resistance as they return
to the beginning of a stroke. Yet it was an intuitive and natural motion, and it helped keep weapons dry. Europeans as early as the seventeenth century studied the frog kick to prepare themselves
for the water, and live frogs were even kept at London’s Serpentine for swimming instruction in the early nineteenth century. England was the center of Western swimming, and English athletes had refined
the breast-stroke so thoroughly that other styles could not compete for decades.
²⁷

The more efficient crawl did not originate with the masters of the breaststroke, who had no incentive to abandon the style they had perfected. Two Native American swimmers, Flying Gull and Tobacco, had demonstrated their overarm style in London in 1844, and Flying Gull was able to cover a 130-foot pool in only
thirty seconds, but their apparently thrashing style was condemned as “un-European.” In fact, many peoples of the Americas, Africa, and Asia had been swimming hand-over-hand. European techniques, the dog paddle and the froglike breaststroke, were the exceptions. But the American Indian style, effective as it was, needed a European smoothness if it was to compete. It was the most distant European outsiders
of the nineteenth century, Australians, who supplied the missing bits of technique. Observing the stroke of South Sea Islanders, they made the kick more pleasing to Europeans. They needed no devices for this they were pure innovators of technique, as were the Swedes who discovered that the springboard—an early-nineteenth-century innovation of the German founder of modern gymnastics, Friedrich
Ludwig Jahn— could be not just an entry platform to the pool but the basis of an independent athletic performance. Throughout the twentieth century, gifted swimmers and coaches have been developing the crawl and other strokes. Often it is swimmers like the backstroke specialist Allen Stack and the butterfly expert Mary T. Meagher whose intuitively shaped motions transform practice. Today, athletes
and coaches are also using imaging technology to study the techniques no longer of frogs, but of marine mammals, birds, and flying insects.
²⁸

The transition from military to recreational swimming instruction illustrates another displacement of physical technique: from work to leisure. Learning any sport is a conscious apprenticeship, or trial-and-error self-tutorial,
in the controlled use of the body. Even if technique really is becoming less important on the job, more of it than ever is apparent at play.

Playful does not mean inconsequential. To the contrary, part of growing up is learning graceful motion. Throwing a baseball is a surprisingly
complex learned behavior. Consider the phrase “throwing like a girl,” directed at Hillary Rodham Clinton after she
ceremonially opened a Cubs baseball game at Wrigley Field in Chicago in April 1994. The writer James Fallows dissected the First Lady’s offending stance and found three elements that distinguished it from proper baseball style: she faced the target rather than positioning her trunk perpendicular to it and then rotating back to amplify the pitch; she kept her elbow below her shoulder while throwing;
and she held the wrist closer to her head than her elbow was (“inside the elbow”). A leading coach, Vic Braden, described the proper motion as a “kinetic chain” in which momentum is built up first from the lower body, continued through the waist to the shoulders, through the upper arm, forearm, and wrist, like the snapping of a whip. Tom Seaver said he pitched with his legs.
²⁹

The pitcher’s fluid
motion may look graceful, but it is hardly natural. Right-handed athletes instinctively throw incorrectly when they try it left-handed. In the earliest days of baseball, it was even illegal; the 1845 Knickerbocker Base Ball Club rules prohibited throwing and specified stiff, underhanded pitching. Today’s pitching at over ninety miles per hour leads to elbow strains and sprains and (notoriously)
tears the muscles of the shoulder’s rotator cuff; one of the most effective variations, the slider, is an ergonomic minefield for the pitcher.
³⁰

Throwing, like other techniques, has evolved through the experimentation of elite athletes and their coaches. The equipment of cricket changed little in the nineteenth century, but because the ball takes a bounce before the batsman swings at it, improvements
in the condition of the pitch (grass surface) tended to help batsmen. Balls bounced true and thus became easier to hit. Bowlers responded with changes in their manner of releasing the ball, reintroducing variety and surprise.
³¹

In American baseball, a few pitchers in the 1860s and 1870s learned how to throw and control a curveball. It arose not accidentally or incrementally from other pitching
styles, but from the insight that a different technique could produce a startling result—an insight followed by many hours of experimentation, self-training, and practice, until the new technique was ready for competitive play. Even in our own time, pure changes of technique continue to appear. Without any significant change in equipment except for safer landing pits, high jumpers experimented with
a half-dozen styles: scissors, eastern cutoff, western roll, and belly roll. In the 1968 Olympics, the American Dick Fosbury revealed yet another maneuver, a twist from a frontal position, clearing the bar headfirst and backward.
Also in the late 1960s, Jean-Claude Killy challenged the wisdom of coaches who taught skiers to lean forward for maximum speed; he became world champion by leaning back.
Athletes and coaches soon adopted Fosbury’s and Killy’s techniques.
³²

It is also possible for techniques to disappear if a new technology leaves them with no competitive advantage. Today the large-wheeled bicycle, called the Ordinary or Pennyfarthing, appears literally the height of impracticality. It is hard to mount and control, even harder to stop, and tends to pitch the rider forward, headfirst,
when it hits an obstacle. Without a freewheel, the rider can never rest, except with legs draped over the handlebars in a downhill maneuver called coasting. There were schools for cyclists, and even examinations in some European cities. Yet according to the sociologist Wiebe Bijker, the Ordinary’s perils were positive for its enthusiasts. These athletic, rich urban young men were not looking
for cheap transportation; the cycles were luxury craft products anyway. Their goal was showing off their courage and skill to young ladies, who do not seem to have even tried to ride them, and to their peers. Many other potential users, of course, saw the design as merely dangerous, not daring, but none of the early modifications could compete with the Ordinary in speed, and some offered doubtful
advantages in safety. By the 1880s, inflatable tires, originally developed to counter vibration, made it possible for new low-slung designs to outrace the Ordinaries, helping end their sporting monopoly. Chain drives on the safety cycles, and their great aerodynamic advantage over the Ordinaries, finally stabilized (to use Bijker’s expression) the bicycle as we know it. Because the skills of riding
the Ordinary no longer bought superior speed, they disappeared.
³³