19 ms·

When the push button was new, people were freaked

304 points by SongofEarth 4y ago

eckza 4y ago
Marshall McLuhan's _Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man_ continues to provide critical insight.
- trgn 4y ago
  The book itself is so much richer than the catchphrases. It's just as important today as 60 years ago.
burlesona 4y ago
Fascinating. There’s always a loss of lower-level knowledge when we introduce abstractions. Yet “we stand upon the shoulders of giants,” it’s the layers of abstractions underneath us that we don’t have to understand or even think about that free our minds to compose ever more amazing technology on top. Still, progression from the layer that you know and love to the next that paves over it is bittersweet.
- falcolas 4y ago
  Philosophizing a little bit (and in agreement with one of the quotes in the conclusion), I think the bittersweet feelings are precisely because very few people try to understand the box, because they consider it to be a black box. But it's often a white box in reality. When the electric push buttons came out, you could trace the wires and usually see the mechanisms which were being triggered. The doorbell, for example. But curiosity rarely seems to push us in that direction, it seems.
- duxup 4y ago
  >we don’t have to understand or even think about But also don't have to make all the same mistakes other folks did / toil our way through to the ... potentially same endpoint. At least as far as code goes I've gone through plenty of experiments that go: "Man I don't need this complex chunk of software, let me just try ..." "Ok now I understand why that chunk of software is the way it is... and it's better than mine... I'll use that." Good learning experience! But do that enough and you just spin your wheels endlessly.
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    I don't do that at all these days. It's almost a guarantee that I'll eventually use the big complex thing, so I rarely even consider trying anything else if it's a project that actually matters.
d--b 4y ago
> The word “button” itself comes from the French bouton, meaning pimple or projection, and to push or thrust forward. What? https://translate.google.com/?sl=fr&tl=en&text=bouton&op=translate https://translate.google.com/?sl=fr&tl=en&text=bouton&op=tra...
- sp332 4y ago
  Scroll down a little bit on that page, and you can see the alternate translation as "pimple".
  - LittleNemoInS 4y ago
    While I agree that bouton can mean pimple or zit, it's the rest of the phrase that I don't understand. Bouton doesn't mean projection, and sure isn't a verb...
    - mbrubeck 4y ago
      Note that the English word was derived from Old French, not Modern French. And Old French noun boton/bouton (”bud”) is itself formed from the Old French verb boter/bouter, “to thrust.” It’s had a variety of meanings in French generally related to ”thing that pushes out.” Google Translate is not a very complete dictionary. You can find many more definitions in Trésor de la langue française informatisé : https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/bouton https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/bouton It means “projection” in the sense of ”bit that sticks out,” like its use in goldsmithing or for the foot at the bottom of a harp.
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        > It means “projection” in the sense of ”bit that sticks out,” And it also means that in English.
      - mbrubeck 4y ago
        (minor correction: the pegs of a harp, not the foot.)
whimsicalism 4y ago
> Today, you’d probably have to schedule an electrician to fix what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells, buttons, and buzzers. "Some" is doing a ton of work in this sentence describing 19th century children.
- osrec 4y ago
  And is probably as applicable to a geeky subset of 21st century children.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    It seems like basically the same problem, really. The "some" is a small chunk of the population maybe, but it is the chunk that is interested in this sort of stuff and would normally use this as a stepping stone on the path to designing the next thing. The hope is that our abstractions are not too good, and the clever kids manage to bash them into something that does what their imagination wants.
  - amelius 4y ago
    And the "normal" children just visit YouTube and search for "how to fix a doorbell".
- karaterobot 4y ago
  I also strongly suspect the number of people who were freaked out by buttons in the 19th century is approximately in that "some" range. Mistrusting electricity is a different story, but that's not the title of the article.
- tiagod 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's way more children today with electronics/electricity skills than back in the day...
  - mikewarot 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure there were way more children back then who had practical skills, now everyone is pushed into "college prep" and discouraged from having practical skills, as they are associated with the lower class workers. The people who keep us all alive are viewed as less worthy... that's our problem in a nutshell.
snvzz 4y ago
Behold... Abstraction!
- an1sotropy 4y ago
  glib response to glib comment: "Abstraction: Not What You Think It Is" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30840873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30840873
charles_f 4y ago
> Today, you’d probably have to schedule an electrician to fix what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells, buttons, and buzzers. Where I live you are technically not allowed to install equipment on 120 or 240 if you are not a certified electrician. Insurance won't cover water damage if installation hasn't been done by a professional plumber. People still do it, but this is not going in the right direction.
- acheron 4y ago
  But it keeps work coming to the electricians' and plumbers' unions (motto: "If you didn't make any mistakes, you're not working fast enough"), and isn't that the important thing?
  - charles_f 4y ago
    For the story, I used "professionals" to rebuild drywall after a flood. They managed to fuck up my ethernet network in the process, but they don't want to admit guilt, and they're telling me to "use wifi instead".
  - Infernal 4y ago
    Strange, my experiences with unionized labor have found the exact opposite - safety conscious to the nth degree, and much more likely to criticize each other for working too quickly than too slowly. They seem to be incentivized to 1) not get dinged for safety infractions and 2) get as many billable hours out of every work order as possible.
- throwie_wayward 4y ago
  I completely disagree... on the trend you back up, I see a future where you cannot cook your own food unless you've become a professional specialist of cooking (for food safety). going to cartoon levels of ridiculousness, a society in which you cannot do anything other than consume unless you're doing a job (which would involve safety, insurance, and other various legal and bureaucratic requirements). what keeps things sane where you live is the 'technically' aspect. which I read as "individuals often ignore those rules for personal reasons (meaning when no businesses are involved)"...
gist 4y ago
This sounds trivially correct but the short article doesn't do enough to support it other than the few anecdotes that are mentioned. This is similar to today when, as an example, the NYT tries to get in front of a trend by highlighting and cherry picking a few examples of people who are doing what one of their articles purports in so many words is more widespread than it really might be. Then take a statement like this: "many laypeople had a “working knowledge not only of electricity, but also of the buttons they pushed and the relationship between the two,” according to Plotnick" What does 'many people' exactly mean? Nothing at all you wouldn't say 'many people got sick from the pandemic' you'd back it up with some type of figure or number.
- teddyh 4y ago
  “Americans are being crushed by falling grand pianos” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347005#30350402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347005#30350402)
anarbadalov 4y ago
Rachel Plotnick's book (Power Button, referenced in the article) is very good. Here's a much longer excerpt from it, on the button as it relates to carrying out life-and-death decisions (e.g., warfare and executions): https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/of-war-and-electric-death-a-brief-history-of-push-button-anxiety/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/of-war-and-electric-death... (Full disclosure: I work for the MIT Press, who published Power Button. But it really is one of my favorite history of tech titles we've published in the 10+ years i've been here)
WaitWaitWha 4y ago
Poppycock. The concept of mechanical push (and pull) buttons have been long present in locks and alarm triggers long before electricity was introduced to general public.
- gumby 4y ago
  As the article points out.
  - WaitWaitWha 4y ago
    Yes, but in my opinion, much of the mental exercise in the article and the book is based on how the electric push button was an entirely new concept.
    - dmix 4y ago
      I don't think the appehresion was so much of the button interface but of the 'black box' automation aspect of it. Where the button isn't physically triggering a function like a spring or lever, instead some 'magic' happens in the behind the scenes. The interface was no longer directly connected to a simple, easily understood sequence of actions. > At the end of the nineteenth century, many laypeople had a “working knowledge not only of electricity, but also of the buttons they pushed and the relationship between the two,” according to Plotnick. Those who promoted electricity and sold electrical devices, however, wanted push-button interfaces to be “simplistic and worry-free.” They thought the world needed less thinking though and tinkering, and more automatic action. “You press the button, we do the rest”—the Eastman Company’s famous slogan for Kodak cameras—could be taken as the slogan for an entire way of life. > Plotnick quotes an educator and activist from 1916 lamenting that pushing a button “seems to relieve one of any necessity for responsibility about what goes on behind the button.”
    - B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
      > entirely new concept. The new concept was power amplification: a small effort causing a larger than "natural" effect. E.g. you were always able to press a button to tinkle a bell, but pressing a button and obtaining a sustained electrical ringing was new. Valves and transistors took it to the present stage, by cascading the effect of small inputs switching larger amounts of power from an external supply. (Yes, power amplification could be done mechanically before electricity with energy from water, weights, etc. but it was too cumbersome.)
cm2187 4y ago
Plus you were never sure you wouldn’t receive an electric shock!
- hulitu 4y ago
  > Plus you were never sure you wouldn’t receive an electric shock! But the electric shock will help you remember what not to touch again.
andirk 4y ago
Let's return to the button where possible. I often prefer physical buttons due to the feedback I get. I know it does nothing, but I'll still press extra hard on a stupid touchscreen if it's not responding. On how touchscreens are over-used for the sake of updating without physical constraints. "The software guys can independently do the design of the UI, changing things down to the very last moment, or even after the last moment if the car can be updated." [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494497 On making light of people born post-1990s how no one can fix anything now. "We care less about repair as most would rather just scrap that broken TV and get a new one. The electronic and small appliance repair store are all but gone" [2] [2] https://qr.ae/pv5PjI https://qr.ae/pv5PjI
- capableweb 4y ago
  > Let's return to the button where possible. I often prefer physical buttons due to the feedback I get. I know it does nothing, but I'll still press extra hard on a stupid touchscreen if it's not responding. Unless, of course, your phone is one of the few where pushing harder will make it perform a different action, if used in the right place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Touch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Touch). > On how touchscreens are over-used for the sake of updating without physical constraints. "The software guys can independently do the design of the UI, changing things down to the very last moment, or even after the last moment if the car can be updated." [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494497 This is akin to frontend developers doing everything in their power to make their development environment the most comfortable, while sacrificing end-user performance/bandwidth/usability for getting it.
  - oakesm9 4y ago
    Force Touch was discontinued in 2019 and replaced with a simple “long press” feature called Haptic Touch. iPhone 11 and later and Apple Watch 6 and onwards don’t have the pressure sensitive layer anymore.
    - Liquid_Fire 4y ago
hulitu 4y ago
> When the Push Button Was New, People Were Freaked So that's why they dissapeared from "Modern" GUIs, UIs and UXs. /s
skydove 4y ago
It's interesting to see that what some companies like Apple are doing nowadays has such historic precedence. And it ties in with the current state of affairs - fewer and fewer people understand electronics. Children are less computer-literate than ever.
- legulere 4y ago
  The question is wether you really need to be literate. As a software developer I cannot write correct assembler code ( with aligning rules, red zone and what not), but at least I can read it. I would guess most programmers cannot do even that. But do they really need it? Isn’t that the advance?
  - hulitu 4y ago
    As a HW developer I cannot write correct code but at least I can read it. /s As a french I cannot write correct english but at least I can read it. /s
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    I can't write or read assembler, but I can program modern languages. We're talking about a whole different level, people who don't even know how to effectively use what they have, troubleshoot basic issues, etc. It's not "This is a magic box" so much as "I don't even know how to use the controls on this box and even if I could there's no button to do that thing anymore". "I can't type or use a calculator" not just "I don't know how to divide numbers on paper"
- granshaw 4y ago
  > Children are less computer-literate than ever. Going back 20 years, I wouldve never guessed this would be the current state of affairs! As an industry we've succeeded in unlocking computing as a background enabler, but have utterly failed in making create-side computing friendly and accessible
- eternityforest 4y ago
  Apple is a unique case. The CAD app might make you forget math, but it lets you make stuff with CAD. Apple hides the filesystem and such but it doesn't really replace it with anything. It's not like they have some super ultra abstraction on top of it, they just straight up reduce the functionality a bit. I don't see much critical value in understanding the things only specialists can or want to do, like how a CPU actually works or how to make an OS, but before Apple every generation had a level of abstraction they could work at that had the full power of previous levels(So long as you accept having to buy all the underlying stuff off the shelf). Now it seems that the very newest computer users actually have less capability, because the abstraction doesn't expose the full power of the machine.
h2odragon 4y ago
Tangental, but the physical mechanisms of electronic controls are often worth study. Ingenious mechanisms move little slivers of metal around in carefully engineered enclosures. It's a more accessible magic that's easy to disregard. The "channel dial" switch on old TV's was awesome.
- cfraenkel 4y ago
  The engineering & tolerances to make a typical microswitch (what makes the pushbutton actually do anything) would make most peoples eyes water. (from boredom, perhaps...) Fun fact - if you engineer the people facing mechanism to keep the switch pin from being depressed all the way flush to the switch housing, the lifetime of the switch increases by roughly a factor of 10. A 0.1 mm difference in pushbutton throw is the difference between getting maybe a million cycles, say 3 ~ 4 years of constant use, and the switch outlasting everything else in the product.
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    Well, they must not actually be doing that on cheap switches, they fail probably 10x as much as anything except maybe power supply equipment and connectors. Mechanical keyswitches have some pretty amazing reliability though. I actually like the touchscreen everything movement in most applications, partly because of this. A screen may be expensive, but good switches might be just as expensive.
dmix 4y ago
We're seeing the same reaction today with AI image generators.
yathaid 4y ago
A meh article, but this: > They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.” was prescient.
tomcam 4y ago
I used to spend ridiculous amounts of money on Halloween displays. The thing that scared people the most was a big red button I encouraged them to press. My plan was to give the first person who pressed it all of our candy and a cash prize. No one ever did.
- daveslash 4y ago
  This is brilliant. tbh, I too, would probably be hesitant to push the History Eraser Button without a case of Space Madness.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    Not only that I answered all questions, things like "Will it scare me?" No. "Will something jump out if I press it?" No. "What's going to happen?" I can tell you that nothing bad will happen and you'll probably like the result. And so on.
dhosek 4y ago
It’s worth noting that there are always the fears of losing touch with the details of stuff that some along with various advances. The same thing was the case when I was in junior high with calculators, “how will you add and multiply if your batteries run out?” but the fact of the matter is, not having to be able to make your own push button switch freed people to advance to other topics. Similarly, in mathematics education, when I was in high school, there were classes entitled College Algebra and College Trigonometry¹ which had the implicit message that these were materials traditionally taught in college² and not in the third year of high school. On the other hand, things like calculating square roots by hand are no longer part of the curriculum, although they may still be taught on occasion by the rare teacher who has those skills as an enrichment topic to fill some class time or as part of the math club’s after-school explorations. We may be filled with nostalgia for our own learning and think that it’s the only way to learn, but as time goes on, some skills just become less important. ⸻ 1. The backs of the textbooks included printed tables for log (both base 10 and ln), sin, cos, tan, cot, sec and csc, with the latter six tables to three thanks to the fact that sinθ=cos(θ-π/2).³ 2. The disjunction between practice and theory has led to this sequence being renamed precalculus in most (if not all) high schools now. 3. The skills to make those tables in the first place are yet another thing that we no longer dedicate long classroom hours to, although Charles Babbage would have thought that being unable to verify the accuracy of your tables was a sign of intellectual weakness.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Not much more magical than delivering a chicken to the butcher, and getting back pieces of meat. Or delivering a typed manuscript to your publisher, and getting a bound book. Or any trade essentially. Having a machine do it - that was new. But not the part about abdicating responsibility for function.
- eternityforest 4y ago
  Almost every trade has people freaking out and trying to push us all to be generalists. And I'll continue ignoring pretty much all of them, because division of labor is a lot of why society is so advanced. I'll grant them the chickens though, mass produced meat is one case where the abstraction hides some horrors that should be exposed. But simple loss of skill isn't enough to convince me. I don't need to be able to build a CPU from scratch, any more than the CPU designer needs to know all of CSS. These things are cool and worth exploring, but most any tech one person can understand themselves is probably a historical curiosity more than a practical thing. The rare exceptions like rope and knots are incredibly fascinating.
- kingfish22 4y ago
  hey Joe, how can I get in touch with you regarding a RE project similar to what you did for Golem a couple years ago? I don't see any private messaging or ways to contact individuals through this site, so I am just responding to your most recent post in hopes to start a dialog. Do you still work on RE projects?
  - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    email in my profile!
    - kingfish22 4y ago
      OK, I am apparently not smart enough to figure out how to do that! LOL When I click your name, there is no email address or option to email. Perhaps you could email mine? We have also posted the job on UpWork if you are on that website?
cercatrova 4y ago
From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b: Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who lived in the great city of the upper region, which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes, and they call the god himself Ammon. To him came Theuth to show his inventions, saying that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use there was in each, and as Theuth enumerated their uses, expressed praise or blame, according as he approved or disapproved. "The story goes that Thamus said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, "This invention, O king," said Theuth, "will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered." But Thamus replied, "Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
- CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  How dare Amun-Ra come into my house and attack me like that! Sure, I'm using Wikipedia to debate stuff on the Internet, but my cell phone makes me a post human augmented, cybernetic being, not a half-educated layman with a fondness for sophistry. Right?
  - MereInterest 4y ago
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
>See - people even rejected great design like buttons when they first came out! It just takes time to get used to new designs! Still don't like your hamburger menu. Sorry not sorry.
contextfree 4y ago
It would be interesting to see articles like this for various common elements of UI widget toolkits, which I guess kind of mix metaphors in that some of them (buttons, sliders) evoke electromechanical devices while others (checkboxes, text boxes) evoke paper forms.
- NonNefarious 4y ago
  I'm going to write one about the idiocy of the "flat" design fad. I wonder how people of 1900 would have felt about having to experimentally poke at things that looked like plain labels or placards, or decorative swatches of paint, to operate a machine.
  - Eleison23 4y ago
    "Every time you try to operate on of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you’ve done it." https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7405023-it-s-the-wild-colour-scheme-that-freaks-me-said-zaphod https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7405023-it-s-the-wild-colou...
  - contextfree 4y ago
    I guess flat design can be tied back into that tension/mixed metaphor between electromechanical and print analogs - it's based on a decision to lean towards the print side of things. Actually the designers of early-ish influential "flat" designed systems such as Windows Phone 7 were quite self-conscious about this, e.g., https://web.archive.org/web/20120322023540/http://mkruzeniski.posterous.com/how-print-design-is-the-future-of-interaction https://web.archive.org/web/20120322023540/http://mkruzenisk... (from 2011)
    - NonNefarious 4y ago
      Thanks for the reply and that link. That article is replete with pretty bogus assertions, even for its time. Print is not all that informative for interactive presentations, aside from general principles of good layout with whitespace and appropriate visual emphasis. The article does indeed mention those, but goes on and on about print without saying what it has to do with buttons you need to press or values you need to adjust. The article also treats all physical-control analogies as bad because of their (now-recognized-as) ridiculous descent into skeuomorphism. But before we had cheesy "leather" textures in "notebook" UIs, or "painted felt" that you could click on in a Blackjack game UI, we had simple two-pixel-wide highlights or shadows on the edges of buttons that instantly told you A. This is a button. B. The button is "pressed." At some point you can't do better than cues afforded by the real world. In the real world (even one full of touchscreens instead of mechanical switches), when you press on something malleable it will deform, and the light and shadow on it will change, showing you it's now concave where you pressed it. If it retains its shape, someone can come along an hour later and say, yep, this thing has been pressed. This doesn't need to be (and never will need to be) learned. Therefore it makes much more sense to stick with minimalist real-world analogs than trying to invent some new design "language" that we're all supposed to memorize and that makes sense across all cultures. No no, blue means ON! Brown means OFF! There's room for new clues, of course. "Greying out" unavailable functions is the best example I can think of. But I'd argue that reducing the contrast on something and making it less visible tells the user intuitively that it's ineffective (or less effective). Conclusion: Windows 95 nailed it.
NonNefarious 4y ago
Fluffy but pretty interesting post. Thanks!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
trophycase 4y ago
they weren't wrong
atoav 4y ago
The problem with Push Buttons is that they are (magnitudes!) cheaper than sometimes more suitable input devices like knobs, switches, etc. This is why they are used everywhere. Sometimes other electromechanical devices would have been the better choice tho.
buescher 4y ago
I haven't heard it in a long time - I think it was mostly confined to people born before 1930, and there aren't many of them around anymore, but "what if I press the wrong button?" used to be a major concern people had about new gadgets. A lot of it came from the shift from appliances like old time wringer washers, where every control has a visible mechanical function or other affordance, to more automated "pushbutton" appliances with internal sequence "programs".
- Falkon1313 4y ago
  Also the change over from a solid visible control panel with a combination of switches, knobs and dials, buttons, LEDs, and maybe an LCD readout, all clearly labeled, to more modern stuff with just a few barely distinguishable unlabeled buttons so tiny you could very easily accidentally press one. And now touch screens where who knows what will happen if you accidentally brush the screen and it interprets that as some secret hidden swipe gesture.
BrainVirus 4y ago
>The mundane interface between human and machine caused social anxiety in the late nineteenth century The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (written in 1909) has a lot of buttons. The novella is an indication that they were more of a symbol than the real source of the anxiety. It was caused by anticipation of things like: - Disconnect of people from nature an each other. - Replacement of real things with simulacra, which then begins to be perceived as the real thing. - Mounting, yet fragile complexity of systems people interact with (initially) and within (eventually). Looking at our society today, it's pretty clear that none of these fears were irrational.
- jdmdmdmdmd 4y ago
  My mind immediately went to Forster as well: >They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.” rings true to me. I think this was and still is a valid concern. At the very least it's a real trade-off. I almost get the feeling that the author in the OP looks down on the knowledge needed to understand machines/technology since it can be replaced by a button. That misses the point entirely though. Taking technology for granted makes you a mindless consumer in my opinion. That's why we're so instinctively disgusted by the population in The Machine Stops. They don't exist in any real sense; they're just the exit nodes of the machine's functions.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  Absolutely this. The article treats skepticism of buttons as some quaint silly thing when it was part of a general criticism of technological society that carried over to the present day and made some valid point. And I don't, by far, embrace the critique of technology but one should indeed take seriously the "criticism of a push-button society".
ajkjk 4y ago
I have noticed an effect similar to Gell-Mann amnesia: Often you see news articles about new things freaking people out: technology, social changes, products, apps. Sometimes people are freaking out for good reason, and sometimes they're just silly, and you think: there are smart people and dumb people in the world, and the dumb people like to freak out about the wrong stuff. And then you read about times in the past when people were freaking out about something that we now know to benign, but you easily forget that those might just be the dumb people from the past. Did anyone who was, like, intelligent or wise worry about push buttons? Presumably not.
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
So I never used "bouton" for "to push forward", and while it is used for a pimple, above all, today, a bouton is simply... a button.
aaron695 4y ago
gweinberg 4y ago
I think buttons for clothing were around centuries before electric push buttons, and the electric buttons were named for the clothing buttons they resembled. Is that not so? So the fact that "button" in French could mean "push" would just be a coincidence, since you don't push clothing buttons. Or at least I don't.
- tantalor 4y ago
  The push/thrust refers to the button itself, not what you do with it. > a button is, etymologically, something that pushes up, or thrusts out https://www.etymonline.com/word/button https://www.etymonline.com/word/button
- lupire 4y ago
  How do you fasten a button, if not by pushing it? Do you pull.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
"At the end of the nineteenth century, many laypeople had a "working knowledge not only of electricity, but also of the buttons they pushed and the relationship between the two," according to Plotnick. Those who promoted electricity and sold electrical devices, however, wanted push-button interfaces to be "simplistic and worry-free."" Imagine people promoting websites and apps not wanting "laypersons" to have working knowledge of computers and computer networks. Imagine them artificially separating all people using computers into two categories: "developers" and "users". "They thought the world needed less thinking though and tinkering, and more automatic action." https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/think_culture/ https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/think_cul...
ck2 4y ago
Not even "new" my mother refused to use a touch-tone phone when they came out. She rented with payment every month for years a rotary phone in the kitchen with a massive 25 foot spiral cord I'd have to untangle every week as it was stretched across the house. When I got older I went and found the exact model in the "Bell store" and bought it and secretly swapped it out one night and returned/cancelled the rental so her bill would go down like $5/mo which back then was a lot. Left the old tangled cord on it so she'd never know.

304 points by SongofEarth 4y ago

eckza 4y ago

Marshall McLuhan's _Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man_ continues to provide critical insight.

trgn 4y ago
The book itself is so much richer than the catchphrases. It's just as important today as 60 years ago.

burlesona 4y ago

Fascinating. There’s always a loss of lower-level knowledge when we introduce abstractions. Yet “we stand upon the shoulders of giants,” it’s the layers of abstractions underneath us that we don’t have to understand or even think about that free our minds to compose ever more amazing technology on top. Still, progression from the layer that you know and love to the next that paves over it is bittersweet.

falcolas 4y ago
Philosophizing a little bit (and in agreement with one of the quotes in the conclusion), I think the bittersweet feelings are precisely because very few people try to understand the box, because they consider it to be a black box. But it's often a white box in reality. When the electric push buttons came out, you could trace the wires and usually see the mechanisms which were being triggered. The doorbell, for example. But curiosity rarely seems to push us in that direction, it seems.
duxup 4y ago
>we don’t have to understand or even think about But also don't have to make all the same mistakes other folks did / toil our way through to the ... potentially same endpoint. At least as far as code goes I've gone through plenty of experiments that go: "Man I don't need this complex chunk of software, let me just try ..." "Ok now I understand why that chunk of software is the way it is... and it's better than mine... I'll use that." Good learning experience! But do that enough and you just spin your wheels endlessly.
- eternityforest 4y ago
  I don't do that at all these days. It's almost a guarantee that I'll eventually use the big complex thing, so I rarely even consider trying anything else if it's a project that actually matters.

d--b 4y ago

> The word “button” itself comes from the French bouton, meaning pimple or projection, and to push or thrust forward. What? https://translate.google.com/?sl=fr&tl=en&text=bouton&op=translate https://translate.google.com/?sl=fr&tl=en&text=bouton&op=tra...

sp332 4y ago
Scroll down a little bit on that page, and you can see the alternate translation as "pimple".
- LittleNemoInS 4y ago
  While I agree that bouton can mean pimple or zit, it's the rest of the phrase that I don't understand. Bouton doesn't mean projection, and sure isn't a verb...
  - mbrubeck 4y ago
    Note that the English word was derived from Old French, not Modern French. And Old French noun boton/bouton (”bud”) is itself formed from the Old French verb boter/bouter, “to thrust.” It’s had a variety of meanings in French generally related to ”thing that pushes out.” Google Translate is not a very complete dictionary. You can find many more definitions in Trésor de la langue française informatisé : https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/bouton https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/bouton It means “projection” in the sense of ”bit that sticks out,” like its use in goldsmithing or for the foot at the bottom of a harp.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      > It means “projection” in the sense of ”bit that sticks out,” And it also means that in English.
    - mbrubeck 4y ago
      (minor correction: the pegs of a harp, not the foot.)

whimsicalism 4y ago

> Today, you’d probably have to schedule an electrician to fix what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells, buttons, and buzzers. "Some" is doing a ton of work in this sentence describing 19th century children.

osrec 4y ago
And is probably as applicable to a geeky subset of 21st century children.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  It seems like basically the same problem, really. The "some" is a small chunk of the population maybe, but it is the chunk that is interested in this sort of stuff and would normally use this as a stepping stone on the path to designing the next thing. The hope is that our abstractions are not too good, and the clever kids manage to bash them into something that does what their imagination wants.
- amelius 4y ago
  And the "normal" children just visit YouTube and search for "how to fix a doorbell".
karaterobot 4y ago
I also strongly suspect the number of people who were freaked out by buttons in the 19th century is approximately in that "some" range. Mistrusting electricity is a different story, but that's not the title of the article.
tiagod 4y ago
Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's way more children today with electronics/electricity skills than back in the day...
- mikewarot 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure there were way more children back then who had practical skills, now everyone is pushed into "college prep" and discouraged from having practical skills, as they are associated with the lower class workers. The people who keep us all alive are viewed as less worthy... that's our problem in a nutshell.

snvzz 4y ago

Behold... Abstraction!

an1sotropy 4y ago
glib response to glib comment: "Abstraction: Not What You Think It Is" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30840873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30840873

charles_f 4y ago

> Today, you’d probably have to schedule an electrician to fix what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells, buttons, and buzzers. Where I live you are technically not allowed to install equipment on 120 or 240 if you are not a certified electrician. Insurance won't cover water damage if installation hasn't been done by a professional plumber. People still do it, but this is not going in the right direction.

acheron 4y ago
But it keeps work coming to the electricians' and plumbers' unions (motto: "If you didn't make any mistakes, you're not working fast enough"), and isn't that the important thing?
- charles_f 4y ago
  For the story, I used "professionals" to rebuild drywall after a flood. They managed to fuck up my ethernet network in the process, but they don't want to admit guilt, and they're telling me to "use wifi instead".
- Infernal 4y ago
  Strange, my experiences with unionized labor have found the exact opposite - safety conscious to the nth degree, and much more likely to criticize each other for working too quickly than too slowly. They seem to be incentivized to 1) not get dinged for safety infractions and 2) get as many billable hours out of every work order as possible.
throwie_wayward 4y ago
I completely disagree... on the trend you back up, I see a future where you cannot cook your own food unless you've become a professional specialist of cooking (for food safety). going to cartoon levels of ridiculousness, a society in which you cannot do anything other than consume unless you're doing a job (which would involve safety, insurance, and other various legal and bureaucratic requirements). what keeps things sane where you live is the 'technically' aspect. which I read as "individuals often ignore those rules for personal reasons (meaning when no businesses are involved)"...

gist 4y ago

This sounds trivially correct but the short article doesn't do enough to support it other than the few anecdotes that are mentioned. This is similar to today when, as an example, the NYT tries to get in front of a trend by highlighting and cherry picking a few examples of people who are doing what one of their articles purports in so many words is more widespread than it really might be. Then take a statement like this: "many laypeople had a “working knowledge not only of electricity, but also of the buttons they pushed and the relationship between the two,” according to Plotnick" What does 'many people' exactly mean? Nothing at all you wouldn't say 'many people got sick from the pandemic' you'd back it up with some type of figure or number.

teddyh 4y ago
“Americans are being crushed by falling grand pianos” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347005#30350402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347005#30350402)

anarbadalov 4y ago

Rachel Plotnick's book (Power Button, referenced in the article) is very good. Here's a much longer excerpt from it, on the button as it relates to carrying out life-and-death decisions (e.g., warfare and executions): https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/of-war-and-electric-death-a-brief-history-of-push-button-anxiety/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/of-war-and-electric-death... (Full disclosure: I work for the MIT Press, who published Power Button. But it really is one of my favorite history of tech titles we've published in the 10+ years i've been here)

WaitWaitWha 4y ago

Poppycock. The concept of mechanical push (and pull) buttons have been long present in locks and alarm triggers long before electricity was introduced to general public.

gumby 4y ago
As the article points out.
- WaitWaitWha 4y ago
  Yes, but in my opinion, much of the mental exercise in the article and the book is based on how the electric push button was an entirely new concept.
  - dmix 4y ago
    I don't think the appehresion was so much of the button interface but of the 'black box' automation aspect of it. Where the button isn't physically triggering a function like a spring or lever, instead some 'magic' happens in the behind the scenes. The interface was no longer directly connected to a simple, easily understood sequence of actions. > At the end of the nineteenth century, many laypeople had a “working knowledge not only of electricity, but also of the buttons they pushed and the relationship between the two,” according to Plotnick. Those who promoted electricity and sold electrical devices, however, wanted push-button interfaces to be “simplistic and worry-free.” They thought the world needed less thinking though and tinkering, and more automatic action. “You press the button, we do the rest”—the Eastman Company’s famous slogan for Kodak cameras—could be taken as the slogan for an entire way of life. > Plotnick quotes an educator and activist from 1916 lamenting that pushing a button “seems to relieve one of any necessity for responsibility about what goes on behind the button.”
  - B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
    > entirely new concept. The new concept was power amplification: a small effort causing a larger than "natural" effect. E.g. you were always able to press a button to tinkle a bell, but pressing a button and obtaining a sustained electrical ringing was new. Valves and transistors took it to the present stage, by cascading the effect of small inputs switching larger amounts of power from an external supply. (Yes, power amplification could be done mechanically before electricity with energy from water, weights, etc. but it was too cumbersome.)

cm2187 4y ago

Plus you were never sure you wouldn’t receive an electric shock!

hulitu 4y ago
> Plus you were never sure you wouldn’t receive an electric shock! But the electric shock will help you remember what not to touch again.

andirk 4y ago

Let's return to the button where possible. I often prefer physical buttons due to the feedback I get. I know it does nothing, but I'll still press extra hard on a stupid touchscreen if it's not responding. On how touchscreens are over-used for the sake of updating without physical constraints. "The software guys can independently do the design of the UI, changing things down to the very last moment, or even after the last moment if the car can be updated." [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494497 On making light of people born post-1990s how no one can fix anything now. "We care less about repair as most would rather just scrap that broken TV and get a new one. The electronic and small appliance repair store are all but gone" [2] [2] https://qr.ae/pv5PjI https://qr.ae/pv5PjI

capableweb 4y ago
> Let's return to the button where possible. I often prefer physical buttons due to the feedback I get. I know it does nothing, but I'll still press extra hard on a stupid touchscreen if it's not responding. Unless, of course, your phone is one of the few where pushing harder will make it perform a different action, if used in the right place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Touch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Touch). > On how touchscreens are over-used for the sake of updating without physical constraints. "The software guys can independently do the design of the UI, changing things down to the very last moment, or even after the last moment if the car can be updated." [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494497 This is akin to frontend developers doing everything in their power to make their development environment the most comfortable, while sacrificing end-user performance/bandwidth/usability for getting it.
- oakesm9 4y ago
  Force Touch was discontinued in 2019 and replaced with a simple “long press” feature called Haptic Touch. iPhone 11 and later and Apple Watch 6 and onwards don’t have the pressure sensitive layer anymore.
  - Liquid_Fire 4y ago

hulitu 4y ago

> When the Push Button Was New, People Were Freaked So that's why they dissapeared from "Modern" GUIs, UIs and UXs. /s

skydove 4y ago

It's interesting to see that what some companies like Apple are doing nowadays has such historic precedence. And it ties in with the current state of affairs - fewer and fewer people understand electronics. Children are less computer-literate than ever.

legulere 4y ago
The question is wether you really need to be literate. As a software developer I cannot write correct assembler code ( with aligning rules, red zone and what not), but at least I can read it. I would guess most programmers cannot do even that. But do they really need it? Isn’t that the advance?
- hulitu 4y ago
  As a HW developer I cannot write correct code but at least I can read it. /s As a french I cannot write correct english but at least I can read it. /s
- eternityforest 4y ago
  I can't write or read assembler, but I can program modern languages. We're talking about a whole different level, people who don't even know how to effectively use what they have, troubleshoot basic issues, etc. It's not "This is a magic box" so much as "I don't even know how to use the controls on this box and even if I could there's no button to do that thing anymore". "I can't type or use a calculator" not just "I don't know how to divide numbers on paper"
granshaw 4y ago
> Children are less computer-literate than ever. Going back 20 years, I wouldve never guessed this would be the current state of affairs! As an industry we've succeeded in unlocking computing as a background enabler, but have utterly failed in making create-side computing friendly and accessible
eternityforest 4y ago
Apple is a unique case. The CAD app might make you forget math, but it lets you make stuff with CAD. Apple hides the filesystem and such but it doesn't really replace it with anything. It's not like they have some super ultra abstraction on top of it, they just straight up reduce the functionality a bit. I don't see much critical value in understanding the things only specialists can or want to do, like how a CPU actually works or how to make an OS, but before Apple every generation had a level of abstraction they could work at that had the full power of previous levels(So long as you accept having to buy all the underlying stuff off the shelf). Now it seems that the very newest computer users actually have less capability, because the abstraction doesn't expose the full power of the machine.

h2odragon 4y ago

Tangental, but the physical mechanisms of electronic controls are often worth study. Ingenious mechanisms move little slivers of metal around in carefully engineered enclosures. It's a more accessible magic that's easy to disregard. The "channel dial" switch on old TV's was awesome.

cfraenkel 4y ago
The engineering & tolerances to make a typical microswitch (what makes the pushbutton actually do anything) would make most peoples eyes water. (from boredom, perhaps...) Fun fact - if you engineer the people facing mechanism to keep the switch pin from being depressed all the way flush to the switch housing, the lifetime of the switch increases by roughly a factor of 10. A 0.1 mm difference in pushbutton throw is the difference between getting maybe a million cycles, say 3 ~ 4 years of constant use, and the switch outlasting everything else in the product.
- eternityforest 4y ago
  Well, they must not actually be doing that on cheap switches, they fail probably 10x as much as anything except maybe power supply equipment and connectors. Mechanical keyswitches have some pretty amazing reliability though. I actually like the touchscreen everything movement in most applications, partly because of this. A screen may be expensive, but good switches might be just as expensive.

dmix 4y ago

We're seeing the same reaction today with AI image generators.

yathaid 4y ago

A meh article, but this: > They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.” was prescient.

tomcam 4y ago

I used to spend ridiculous amounts of money on Halloween displays. The thing that scared people the most was a big red button I encouraged them to press. My plan was to give the first person who pressed it all of our candy and a cash prize. No one ever did.

daveslash 4y ago
This is brilliant. tbh, I too, would probably be hesitant to push the History Eraser Button without a case of Space Madness.
- tomcam 4y ago
  Not only that I answered all questions, things like "Will it scare me?" No. "Will something jump out if I press it?" No. "What's going to happen?" I can tell you that nothing bad will happen and you'll probably like the result. And so on.

dhosek 4y ago

It’s worth noting that there are always the fears of losing touch with the details of stuff that some along with various advances. The same thing was the case when I was in junior high with calculators, “how will you add and multiply if your batteries run out?” but the fact of the matter is, not having to be able to make your own push button switch freed people to advance to other topics. Similarly, in mathematics education, when I was in high school, there were classes entitled College Algebra and College Trigonometry¹ which had the implicit message that these were materials traditionally taught in college² and not in the third year of high school. On the other hand, things like calculating square roots by hand are no longer part of the curriculum, although they may still be taught on occasion by the rare teacher who has those skills as an enrichment topic to fill some class time or as part of the math club’s after-school explorations. We may be filled with nostalgia for our own learning and think that it’s the only way to learn, but as time goes on, some skills just become less important. ⸻ 1. The backs of the textbooks included printed tables for log (both base 10 and ln), sin, cos, tan, cot, sec and csc, with the latter six tables to three thanks to the fact that sinθ=cos(θ-π/2).³ 2. The disjunction between practice and theory has led to this sequence being renamed precalculus in most (if not all) high schools now. 3. The skills to make those tables in the first place are yet another thing that we no longer dedicate long classroom hours to, although Charles Babbage would have thought that being unable to verify the accuracy of your tables was a sign of intellectual weakness.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

Not much more magical than delivering a chicken to the butcher, and getting back pieces of meat. Or delivering a typed manuscript to your publisher, and getting a bound book. Or any trade essentially. Having a machine do it - that was new. But not the part about abdicating responsibility for function.

eternityforest 4y ago
Almost every trade has people freaking out and trying to push us all to be generalists. And I'll continue ignoring pretty much all of them, because division of labor is a lot of why society is so advanced. I'll grant them the chickens though, mass produced meat is one case where the abstraction hides some horrors that should be exposed. But simple loss of skill isn't enough to convince me. I don't need to be able to build a CPU from scratch, any more than the CPU designer needs to know all of CSS. These things are cool and worth exploring, but most any tech one person can understand themselves is probably a historical curiosity more than a practical thing. The rare exceptions like rope and knots are incredibly fascinating.
kingfish22 4y ago
hey Joe, how can I get in touch with you regarding a RE project similar to what you did for Golem a couple years ago? I don't see any private messaging or ways to contact individuals through this site, so I am just responding to your most recent post in hopes to start a dialog. Do you still work on RE projects?
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  email in my profile!
  - kingfish22 4y ago
    OK, I am apparently not smart enough to figure out how to do that! LOL When I click your name, there is no email address or option to email. Perhaps you could email mine? We have also posted the job on UpWork if you are on that website?

cercatrova 4y ago

From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b: Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who lived in the great city of the upper region, which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes, and they call the god himself Ammon. To him came Theuth to show his inventions, saying that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use there was in each, and as Theuth enumerated their uses, expressed praise or blame, according as he approved or disapproved. "The story goes that Thamus said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, "This invention, O king," said Theuth, "will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered." But Thamus replied, "Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

CobrastanJorji 4y ago
How dare Amun-Ra come into my house and attack me like that! Sure, I'm using Wikipedia to debate stuff on the Internet, but my cell phone makes me a post human augmented, cybernetic being, not a half-educated layman with a fondness for sophistry. Right?
- MereInterest 4y ago

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

>See - people even rejected great design like buttons when they first came out! It just takes time to get used to new designs! Still don't like your hamburger menu. Sorry not sorry.

contextfree 4y ago

It would be interesting to see articles like this for various common elements of UI widget toolkits, which I guess kind of mix metaphors in that some of them (buttons, sliders) evoke electromechanical devices while others (checkboxes, text boxes) evoke paper forms.

NonNefarious 4y ago
I'm going to write one about the idiocy of the "flat" design fad. I wonder how people of 1900 would have felt about having to experimentally poke at things that looked like plain labels or placards, or decorative swatches of paint, to operate a machine.
- Eleison23 4y ago
  "Every time you try to operate on of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you’ve done it." https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7405023-it-s-the-wild-colour-scheme-that-freaks-me-said-zaphod https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7405023-it-s-the-wild-colou...
- contextfree 4y ago
  I guess flat design can be tied back into that tension/mixed metaphor between electromechanical and print analogs - it's based on a decision to lean towards the print side of things. Actually the designers of early-ish influential "flat" designed systems such as Windows Phone 7 were quite self-conscious about this, e.g., https://web.archive.org/web/20120322023540/http://mkruzeniski.posterous.com/how-print-design-is-the-future-of-interaction https://web.archive.org/web/20120322023540/http://mkruzenisk... (from 2011)
  - NonNefarious 4y ago
    Thanks for the reply and that link. That article is replete with pretty bogus assertions, even for its time. Print is not all that informative for interactive presentations, aside from general principles of good layout with whitespace and appropriate visual emphasis. The article does indeed mention those, but goes on and on about print without saying what it has to do with buttons you need to press or values you need to adjust. The article also treats all physical-control analogies as bad because of their (now-recognized-as) ridiculous descent into skeuomorphism. But before we had cheesy "leather" textures in "notebook" UIs, or "painted felt" that you could click on in a Blackjack game UI, we had simple two-pixel-wide highlights or shadows on the edges of buttons that instantly told you A. This is a button. B. The button is "pressed." At some point you can't do better than cues afforded by the real world. In the real world (even one full of touchscreens instead of mechanical switches), when you press on something malleable it will deform, and the light and shadow on it will change, showing you it's now concave where you pressed it. If it retains its shape, someone can come along an hour later and say, yep, this thing has been pressed. This doesn't need to be (and never will need to be) learned. Therefore it makes much more sense to stick with minimalist real-world analogs than trying to invent some new design "language" that we're all supposed to memorize and that makes sense across all cultures. No no, blue means ON! Brown means OFF! There's room for new clues, of course. "Greying out" unavailable functions is the best example I can think of. But I'd argue that reducing the contrast on something and making it less visible tells the user intuitively that it's ineffective (or less effective). Conclusion: Windows 95 nailed it.

NonNefarious 4y ago

Fluffy but pretty interesting post. Thanks!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

trophycase 4y ago

they weren't wrong

atoav 4y ago

The problem with Push Buttons is that they are (magnitudes!) cheaper than sometimes more suitable input devices like knobs, switches, etc. This is why they are used everywhere. Sometimes other electromechanical devices would have been the better choice tho.

buescher 4y ago

I haven't heard it in a long time - I think it was mostly confined to people born before 1930, and there aren't many of them around anymore, but "what if I press the wrong button?" used to be a major concern people had about new gadgets. A lot of it came from the shift from appliances like old time wringer washers, where every control has a visible mechanical function or other affordance, to more automated "pushbutton" appliances with internal sequence "programs".

Falkon1313 4y ago
Also the change over from a solid visible control panel with a combination of switches, knobs and dials, buttons, LEDs, and maybe an LCD readout, all clearly labeled, to more modern stuff with just a few barely distinguishable unlabeled buttons so tiny you could very easily accidentally press one. And now touch screens where who knows what will happen if you accidentally brush the screen and it interprets that as some secret hidden swipe gesture.

BrainVirus 4y ago

>The mundane interface between human and machine caused social anxiety in the late nineteenth century The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (written in 1909) has a lot of buttons. The novella is an indication that they were more of a symbol than the real source of the anxiety. It was caused by anticipation of things like: - Disconnect of people from nature an each other. - Replacement of real things with simulacra, which then begins to be perceived as the real thing. - Mounting, yet fragile complexity of systems people interact with (initially) and within (eventually). Looking at our society today, it's pretty clear that none of these fears were irrational.

jdmdmdmdmd 4y ago
My mind immediately went to Forster as well: >They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.” rings true to me. I think this was and still is a valid concern. At the very least it's a real trade-off. I almost get the feeling that the author in the OP looks down on the knowledge needed to understand machines/technology since it can be replaced by a button. That misses the point entirely though. Taking technology for granted makes you a mindless consumer in my opinion. That's why we're so instinctively disgusted by the population in The Machine Stops. They don't exist in any real sense; they're just the exit nodes of the machine's functions.
joe_the_user 4y ago
Absolutely this. The article treats skepticism of buttons as some quaint silly thing when it was part of a general criticism of technological society that carried over to the present day and made some valid point. And I don't, by far, embrace the critique of technology but one should indeed take seriously the "criticism of a push-button society".

ajkjk 4y ago

I have noticed an effect similar to Gell-Mann amnesia: Often you see news articles about new things freaking people out: technology, social changes, products, apps. Sometimes people are freaking out for good reason, and sometimes they're just silly, and you think: there are smart people and dumb people in the world, and the dumb people like to freak out about the wrong stuff. And then you read about times in the past when people were freaking out about something that we now know to benign, but you easily forget that those might just be the dumb people from the past. Did anyone who was, like, intelligent or wise worry about push buttons? Presumably not.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

So I never used "bouton" for "to push forward", and while it is used for a pimple, above all, today, a bouton is simply... a button.

aaron695 4y ago

gweinberg 4y ago

I think buttons for clothing were around centuries before electric push buttons, and the electric buttons were named for the clothing buttons they resembled. Is that not so? So the fact that "button" in French could mean "push" would just be a coincidence, since you don't push clothing buttons. Or at least I don't.

tantalor 4y ago
The push/thrust refers to the button itself, not what you do with it. > a button is, etymologically, something that pushes up, or thrusts out https://www.etymonline.com/word/button https://www.etymonline.com/word/button
lupire 4y ago
How do you fasten a button, if not by pushing it? Do you pull.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

"At the end of the nineteenth century, many laypeople had a "working knowledge not only of electricity, but also of the buttons they pushed and the relationship between the two," according to Plotnick. Those who promoted electricity and sold electrical devices, however, wanted push-button interfaces to be "simplistic and worry-free."" Imagine people promoting websites and apps not wanting "laypersons" to have working knowledge of computers and computer networks. Imagine them artificially separating all people using computers into two categories: "developers" and "users". "They thought the world needed less thinking though and tinkering, and more automatic action." https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/think_culture/ https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/think_cul...

ck2 4y ago

Not even "new" my mother refused to use a touch-tone phone when they came out. She rented with payment every month for years a rotary phone in the kitchen with a massive 25 foot spiral cord I'd have to untangle every week as it was stretched across the house. When I got older I went and found the exact model in the "Bell store" and bought it and secretly swapped it out one night and returned/cancelled the rental so her bill would go down like $5/mo which back then was a lot. Left the old tangled cord on it so she'd never know.