To read this article, chances are you had to first press a button to turn your computer on. You may have double-clicked your mouse button to open a web browser, pressed keyboard buttons to type your email password, and clicked the mouse again to open the link to this story.
How many buttons did you press to be able to read these words? How many buttons do you press in a single day?
“I counted one day, and I pushed 30,000 buttons or switches in a single day,” said Jason Puskar, a UWM professor of English and the author of the new book, The Switch: An Off and on History of Digital Humans. The book, published earlier this year, traces the history of buttons and switches and the enormous impact these simple devices have had on humanity.
The book covers an eclectic range of subjects. Puskar admits that it’s impossible to write a truly comprehensive history of buttons and switches; they’re too ubiquitous. But, he said, he enjoyed “following his nose” to find subjects for different sections of his book. From determining the origin of our terminology for switching; to exploring childhood play with buttons; to tracing the histories of keyboard keys, remote controls, and the nuclear button, Puskar’s work asks his audience to think about how these gadgets have shaped humanity’s lens of the world.
Here are some of the things you should know about Puskar’s book, buttons, and binary switches.
1. Where do the words come from?
Puskar is an English professor, so naturally, he started the book with the definition of the words.
You could argue – and Puskar does in his book – that buttons and switches have been in use since the days of the ancient Greeks. But our modern term “button” hails from the days of the telegraph. It was then that people first began to use the term to refer to a piece of technology, rather than just as a clothing fastener.
“It was borrowed from the French word bouton, which (means) something that ‘butts out,’” Puskar explained. “It could be a little hook, a decorative end of a curtain rod. Eventually, those things that butt out started to get used in more mechanically interactive ways.
“Some of the earliest uses of the word ‘button’ in English were applied to the key of a telegraph … mostly by journalists, who were trying to explain this strange new thing that was actually an electrical contact switch.”
Switches themselves, Puskar added, got their name from railroad switch tracks.
“On the track itself, you have two positions: Right or left. There’s no ‘in the middle,’” Puskar said. “A light switch is like that. You can have it on or off. It’s a strictly binary system.”
2. The binary has impacted how humans view the world.
That binary is important, Puskar argues. You can think of the world in terms of digital or analog; black and white versus shades of gray.
“Binary code long predates computers. It was really the mid-19th century when Westerners started transforming what used to be analog activities,” Puskar noted. “We’ve grown that so tremendously all through our culture that it’s hard to fathom a time when we didn’t do that.”
He likes to use an example, especially appropriate in the winter months: How do you heat your living space? You used to have to perform a series of analog actions. First you had to retrieve firewood, chop and stack it, and ensure it was properly dried. Then you had to bring the wood into your home, arrange it in the fireplace or stove, and ignite it.
“But now when I heat my house, I walk over to a little box on the wall and I push a button. Up it goes, one degree,” Puskar said. “All of that analog messiness … is gone.
“For me,” he added, “all of this has the effect of aggrandizing ourselves as successful individuals who are powerful and capable. I want to raise the heat in my house? Bam, I just heated my house. I did it effortlessly and instantaneously.”
3. The baddest button of them all is the nuclear button.
With the flip of a switch, we can bring light to the darkness. With the press of a button, we can heat our home, cook our food, or call someone on the other side of the world. With the pull of a trigger, a kind of proto-switch, we can fire a gun, or a bomb, or an intercontinental ballistic missile.
“By the last section of the book, we’re looking at power taken to such an extreme it’s more like mastery or domination,” Puskar said. “The nuclear button is kind of the endpoint of that. It’s the gun you can fire only once.”
Of course, launching a nuclear warhead can’t be accomplished by pressing a single button; there are a multitude of safeguards and procedures in place to prevent mass destruction. But Puskar’s point is that pushing a button has become so easy for humanity that we’ve perhaps forgotten the limits of our own power. People have come to rely on buttons to the point that there is an “enfeebling that happens alongside empowering,” Puskar said.
The thermostat from our earlier example warms the house when Puskar presses a button, but only so long as the thermostat is working properly, or the furnace isn’t broken, or the power company is providing energy to his home. We’re only powerful as long as the button works when we press it.
“That’s what we conceal from ourselves, behind the walls, down in the basement, and at the power plant,” Puskar said. “It feels like I raised the temperature one degree with the touch of my magic finger, because I no longer see the stack of wood or the people who cut it.”
4. It’s fun to push buttons. We’ve been doing it since we were kids.
One thing he hopes his audience takes away is a greater sense of how buttons have become great equalizers –and the consequences of that equality. After all, everyone knows how to push a button, even children.
One of the reasons that Puskar was inspired to write this book was because his young children, like most kids their age, are button enthusiasts. “My wife used to take them out to the car for ‘Button Day,’ and they got to push and switch and do whatever they wanted until they were exhausted,” Puskar joked.
But that started him thinking about how pressing buttons and flipping switches has an almost universal appeal for children. In fact, pushing buttons is a formative experience for all humans. Most of us knew how to press a button before we could even speak as infants.
But that makes sense, Puskar argues. Children show they want things by pointing at them, and then an attentive mother will bring it to them. We push buttons with much the same gesture, by pointing with our finger and pressing. And lo and behold, an attentive motherboard brings us what we want.
The Switch: An Off and on History of Digital Humans is available on Amazon, through the University of Minnesota Press, at Boswell Books, and other booksellers.
By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science