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Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing

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Push a button and turn on the television; tap a button and get a ride; click a button and "like" something. The touch of a finger can set an appliance, a car, or a 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 them, loathe them, and fear them? In Power Button, Rachel Plotnick traces the origins of today's push-button society by examining how buttons have been made, distributed, used, rejected, and refashioned throughout history. Focusing on the period between 1880 and 1925, when "technologies of the hand" proliferated (including typewriters, telegraphs, and fingerprinting), Plotnick describes the ways that button pushing became a means for digital command, which promised effortless, discreet, and fool-proof control. Emphasizing the doubly digital nature of button pushing-as an act of the finger and a binary activity (on/off, up/down)-Plotnick suggests that the tenets of precomputational digital command anticipate contemporary ideas of computer users.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

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Detail Information

Series Title

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Call Number

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Publisher

: The MIT Press., 2018

Collation

1 online resource

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780262347501

Classification

NONE

Content Type

text

Media Type

computer

Carrier Type

online resource

Edition

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Subject(s)

Social psychology.
Object (Philosophy)
Industrial revolution.
Remote control
Electric switchgear

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

Rachel Plotnick.

Other Information

Cataloger

heri

Source

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Validator

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Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/3665/Power-ButtonA-History-of-Pleasure-Panic-and-the

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