Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (42 page)

Among these varieties, the most ubiquitous symbol of the rebirth of head protection remains the bicycle helmet, the commonest, lightest, most colorful, and most controversial of all.
Yet it is also relatively recent. It began with the surge of mountain bicycles in the mid-1980s, and was led by Bell Sports, the largest maker of auto racing helmets. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the size of the potential market encouraged Bell and others to increase the appeal of protection by using new and lighter materials and ventilated aerodynamic shapes to reduce weight without degrading
performance, although tooling for some of the most striking models requires (like so many other high technologies) time-consuming and high-priced hand craftsmanship.
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Thanks to stylish design and growing markets, a once stodgy idea became sexy and youthful. In 2001, the CPSC reported that 69 percent of child cyclists and 43 percent of adults in the United States wore helmets. Yet this apparent
success has turned up a paradox. In the decade from 1991 to 2001 the surge in helmets was accompanied by a decline in rider-ship and an increase in cyclist accidents, resulting in 51 percent more head injuries per bicyclist. To some opponents of mandatory helmet laws, these statistics are the result of what is called risk compensation, bolder behavior arising from the feeling of enhanced security.
And there are indeed people who will push the envelope of any safety device. But most bicycle safety advocates reject an increase of risk taking as an explanation. They believe the CPSC statistics of helmet use may be exaggerated, and they point to adverse traffic conditions, more aggressive behavior by motorists (attributed in turn by risk compensation theorists to the reassurance of seat belts
and air bags) and faster bicycles (which the same theorists would probably explain by the perceived safety of helmets). One major point on which both sides appear to agree is that helmets offer limited protection in automobile-bicycle collisions.
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The most powerful case against mandatory bicycle helmet laws may be that they ignore the primary role of motorists in cycling injuries and transfer
too much of the burden of safety to the cyclist. There is evidence that they also discourage cycling, especially because effective helmets are not cheap relative to the price of bicycles and because they must be replaced after absorbing shocks and as children’s heads grow. Thus the British Medical Association has endorsed voluntary bicycle helmet use but opposed a
legal requirement, on the grounds
that the health benefits of bicycle exercise far outweigh risks of injury.
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Today’s sports helmet does the same job as the ones introduced in the ancient Near East. It spares the wearer a skull fracture or concussion by spreading the energy of an impact, no longer with a mace tip but with an asphalt surface. And, like the ancient helmet, it can build group spirit. Ancient, medieval, and twentieth-century
military helmets were designed in part to foster morale; in the view of critics, the sporting helmet may create an excess of confidence. And many wearers of today, like Greek hoplites and medieval soldiers before them, complain of stuffiness, heat, and sensory barriers. The similarities between warlike and recreational helmets go even further, in the view of at least one commentator.
In 1984, a twenty-nine-year-old writer and amateur hockey player, Gregory Bayan, defended his bareheaded ways in
Newsweek
. Lamenting the loss of daring individuality from Olympic and professional hockey, regretting the appearance of televised players as “identical automatons,” he compared the helmet to “a dorsal fin that breaks water and heralds the presence of a leviathan … something deeply wrong
in America.” To Bayan, the helmet’s enthusiasts were “Hardheads,” determined to eradicate individuality and risk in the name of safety.
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Yet the most curious result of the avoidance of risk was to appear only in the late 1980s, as the result of a successful medical campaign to reduce sudden infant death syndrome (S I D S). Parents were urged to put babies to sleep on their backs so as to lower
the risk of their suffocating. The unintended consequence was that many infants spent so much time on their backs that their heads became flattened, a condition called plagiocephaly. While mild cases can self-correct if parents vary their babies’ positions while the babies are supervised or awake, thousands of infants have been wearing custom-made orthopedic helmets to correct the condition. There
are already seventeen companies making them in the United States alone. This therapy is a small price to pay for occasional and reversible mishaps of a lifesaving technique, but it also shows that one is never too young to become a Hardhead. The helmet was born in ancient warfare, and in wearing it we have become men, women, and children from Mars.
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Epilogue
Thumbs Up

E
VERYDAY TECHNOLOGY
sometimes reshapes the body; the feet of shod people are different from the feet of those who have always walked barefoot. More important, it helps shape how we use our bodies. Technology, and the techniques of using it, have coevolved over millennia.

The most challenging open question is whether mind, body, and machine will fuse in some radical new
way over the next generation. For over fifty years, waves of enthusiasts have proclaimed the dawning of a new age of augmented humanity. But they are far from agreed on the mechanism. For some, the intimacy is limited to even more portable and powerful versions of the devices we take with us now: computers that might be as easily carried as cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) now are,
and viewed through special eyeglass displays. Spectacles could also transmit the emotional states of users so that a speaker, for example, could detect a group’s interest or boredom. There are already sneakers that can transmit or record information on a runner’s performance, and even civilian motorcycle helmets with intercoms and navigation aids built in. Other enthusiasts scorn mere wearability;
they are having sensors and transmitters surgically implanted in their bodies, as some deaf children and adults have been fitted with cochlear implants that restore hearing. The cyborg or human-machine is probably the most powerful and persistent idea, perhaps because it seems a logical next step from technological symbiosis. Politically the cyborg movement extends from Paul Verhoeven’s original
RoboCop
film to the work of Donna Haraway and
Chris Hables Gray, who see the connection between human and machine as an emancipatory strategy against rigid economic and gender roles.
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But is the body really becoming more mechanized? George Washington never wore wooden teeth, and his last set of dentures—made of gold plates inset with hippopotamus teeth, human teeth, and elephant and hippo ivory,
hinged with a gold spring—was as good as the craftsmen of his time could produce. He still suffered great discomfort, eating and speaking with difficulty. Yet perhaps this reserve only enhanced his dignity. In any case, it should not be surprising that one in ten Americans had an implant of some kind, not including dentures, by 2002; the nation was founded by a cyborg. Nor was Washington an isolated
case. Thomas Jefferson’s polygraph (not a lie detector but a linkage and second pen automatically tracing a duplicate of his writing) and semireclining work chair and Benjamin Franklin’s bifocals were also giant steps in human-mechanical hybridization. (John F. Kennedy continued the cyborg tradition as one of the first political adopters of the robotic signature machine, a giant and distinctively
American step in the cloning of gesture.)
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Without antiseptics or antibiotics, wounds in the U.S. Civil War demanded extensive amputation and created an innovative artificial-limb industry. Today, responsive advanced prosthetics, wheelchairs, vision implants, and other assistive devices exceed the nineteenth century’s wildest dreams; there is even litigation in the United States on whether a
teenage swimmer with an artificial leg was unfairly barred from wearing a flipper on it. But the first choice of medicine and dentistry is still the conservation of natural materials and abilities. The trend has gone from spectacles to contact lenses to laser surgery; dentistry has moved steadily from dentures to prophylaxis and conservation of endangered natural teeth. And some dental researchers
believe that adults may be able to grow replacement teeth naturally, just as children teethe. Other regeneration, including the recovery of function for paraplegics and quadriplegics, may follow. And no robot can match the performance of a trained assistance dog.
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The body remains surprisingly and reassuringly conservative. The zori design is still used for some of the most stylish sandals for
women and men. Even the majority of athletic shoes with the most technically advanced uppers and soles still use a system of lacing at least two hundred years old. The most advanced new office chairs still rely on the hundred-year-old principle of a spring-mounted lumbar support, for all their additional adjustments. Recliners still place the body in the same contours as the library chairs of the
nineteenth century; interest in built-in data ports
and other technological enhancements is fading, according to industry sources. Not only has the QWERTY arrangement resisted all reform movements, but even alternatives to the flat conventional keyboard are expensive niche products, partly because of innovators’ marketing difficulties, but also because few users are willing to relearn techniques
in the absence of discomfort. A century after the piano started to lose its prestige and markets, it remains the master instrument with its familiar keyboard. Computers help produce advanced progressive eyeglasses without the apparent breaks of bifocals, but wearers still hold glasses on their heads with the folding temples introduced in the eighteenth century. The latest NATO helmet echoes the
outlines of the medieval sallet. But then, our foot bones and vertebrae and fingers and eyes and ears and skulls have not changed much, either. Even automatic transmissions rely on a familiar tactile principle, a knob or handle and lever; push-button shifting is largely a memory of the Edsel. And the twenty-first century’s automobiles are still directed and controlled by wheels and pedals—familiar
from early modern sailing ships and wagons—rather than the alternative interfaces that appeared in patents and experimental cars. Meanwhile, many technological professionals study body techniques that may need few or no external devices: yoga, martial arts, and the Alexander Technique.

Even the Christopher Columbus of wearable computing has misgivings about integrating himself with today’s “smart”
technology. Steve Mann holds an MIT doctorate in computer science and teaches in Canada; he was photographed wearing a helmet equipped with a video camera and a rabbit-ears antenna as early as 1980. In his book
Cyborg
, he acknowledges being “increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of a cyborg future,” where privacy is sacrificed for pleasure and convenience to a degree he compares to drug addiction.
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Today’s real advanced cyborg technology is actually neither utopian nor apocalyptic. Virtual-reality helmets are still not playthings but professional tools demanding rigorous training in physical and mental techniques to prevent disorientation and lapses in judgment. At the other extreme of complexity, miniature keyboards on cellular telephones and other devices are surprisingly influential.
They have been shifting the balance of power of the human hand from the index finger to the thumb. We have seen that C. P. E. Bach elevated the thumb’s role in playing the musical keyboard 250 years ago, and that the pioneers of touch typing rediscovered the fourth and fifth fingers but banished the thumb to tripping the space bar. Now the thumb is enjoying a second renaissance.

The thumb is
coming back to computing with pen- and pencil-like devices, such as the styli used with PDAs. Even a radical new mouse, developed by the Swedish physician and ergonomist Johan Ullman, is gripped and moved around the desk with a pen-shaped stick, using the precision muscles of the thumb and fingers rather than twisting the hand and tiring the forearm, in Dr. Ullman’s analysis. As for pencils themselves,
they have had some of their strongest unit sales yet, increasing by over 50 percent in the United States in the 1990s.
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The biggest surprise for the thumb is electronic. In Japan today, there are so many new data entry devices that young people are called
oyayubi sedai
, the Thumb Generation. In Asia and Europe, these users have turned voice recognition on its head, sending short text messages
to friends, thumbs jumping around their cellular keyboards. By 2002, there were over 1.4 billion of these transmissions each month in the United Kingdom alone. One British researcher, Sadie Plant, has found that thumbs all around the world are becoming stronger and more skillful. Some young Japanese are now even pointing and ringing doorbells with them. As Plant told the
Wall Street Journal
, “The
relationship between technology and the users of technology is mutual. We are changing each other.” The major laboratories did not predestine the thumb as the successor to the index finger, though they did help make the thumb’s usefulness possible. The full capacities of the digit were discovered through the joint experimentation of users, designers, and manufacturers. And its new role is an expression
of the intimate relationship described by Frank Wilson, writing of the “twenty-four-karat thumb”: “The brain keeps giving the hand new things to do and new ways of doing what it already knows how to do. In turn, the hand affords the brain new ways of approaching old tasks and the possibility of understanding and mastering new tasks.”
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In learning new body skills, we have sometimes neglected others.
Scores of resting positions known to anthropologists are being replaced by a single style of sitting; humanity has been losing not only languages but body techniques. Infant feeders compete with the emotional and physiological rewards of nursing. Sneakers assist fitness programs, but some may interfere with older people’s sense of balance. The reclining chair, originally sold partly as a health
device, has become an emblem of the dangers of sedentary living. The piano’s high plateau of development in the nineteenth century prepared the way for the player piano and ultimately for recorded music. Typewriter and computer keyboards have eliminated much of the grind of learning penmanship, but also the pleasure of a personal
hand. The growth of public education has been accompanied by an
increase of myopia, and of eyeglass wearing. And the helmet can promote as well as ward off danger. While augmenting our powers, these devices increase their power over us.

One challenge of advanced industrial societies is a degree of standardization that threatens to choke off both new technologies and new techniques. The remedy is a return to the collaboration between user and maker that marked
so many of the great innovations, whether the shaping of the classic American fire helmet or the development of the touch method by expert typists and typing teachers. And research even in the most advanced technical processes confirms the importance of users. In the 1980s, the economist Eric von Hippel studied change in high-technology industries such as the manufacture of scientific instruments
and semiconductors and the assembly of printed circuit boards. He found that up to 77 percent of innovations were initiated by users and recommended that manufacturers identify and work with a vanguard of “lead users.” We have seen how nineteenth-century musicians worked with piano manufacturers, and how the typewriter entrepreneur James Densmore tested his ideas with the court reporter James
O. Clephane. Even rank-and-file operators are able to help modify equipment and systems in the interest of safety and productivity. Cognitive psychologists who study work are rejecting an older model of a single, best set of procedures and learning from the way in which workers modify equipment to help do their jobs better. As Kim J. Vicente puts it, “Workers finish the design.”
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Design should
be not only user-friendly but user-challenging. The piano keyboard is rightly celebrated as an interface manageable for the novice and inexhaustible for the expert. Information interfaces should also invite the beginner while offering the experienced user the chance to develop new techniques rather than attempting to anticipate every desire. Participatory design, introduced by the mathematician
and computer scientist Kristen Nygaard, began with Norwegian workers who wanted a say in the development of technology in their industries, but was ultimately embraced by corporations worldwide.
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The thumb keyboard has a sad aspect, the threat to handwriting traditions, whether Asian or Western. But it also has a positive side as a mark of human resorucefulness. Thus the thumb may be the best
symbol for a new technological optimism based on user self-reliance, a proletarian digit resurgent in the digital age. The index finger signifies authority, marking regulations and warnings in texts, wagging and lecturing in person: the
Rules. The thumb connotes the practical knowledge men and women have worked out for themselves: the Rules of Thumb. And it represents tacit knowledge, the skills
we can’t always explain: as in the Green Thumb. Most of all, when extended in the almost lost art of hitchhiking, the thumb shows the right attitude toward the future, open and cooperative but with a firm sense of direction.