Catharine Coleborne on Rachel Plotnick’s *Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing*

Some years ago, a colleague in the field of Speech Pathology research became very animated by the idea of researching the history of the hospital call bell. Specialising in communication and assistive technology, this researcher sought my advice about how to go about finding more information about the introduction of hospital call bells for patients. I had to admit I knew little about the subject. With Rachel Plotnick’s book Power Button, reissued by MIT Press in 2024, we now have a new opportunity to understand the past histories of the mechanism, meanings and massification of button technology as we exist in the present ubiquity of the button in the digital age. We are now so accustomed to using our fingers and hands to engage with digital devices, or use elevators, or to type in codes for door entrances, that our knowledge of the actual ‘button’ has diminished.

This book offers readers a fascinating account of the histories and practices of push buttons in everyday use. In three sections, ‘You Rang?’, ‘Automagically’, and ‘Imagining Digital Command’, Plotnick takes readers through both a chronology of the button that intersects with changing patterns of labour, and an account of the way people have incorporated technologies into their bodily practices. It focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century from 1880 to 1925 and considers the button as a technology that extended the work of the hands and muscles, integrated the significance of touch for humans engaging with machines, and challenged and changed ideas about spatial relations.  Humans were, by the early twentieth century, labouring with machines, not separately from them. They were also using these technologies to command and manage other humans.

Plotnick’s scholarly contributions to Science and Technology Studies include research about relationships between humans and technology, gender and mobile technologies, and the hygiene of human touch and specific technologies including screens and vinyl records. Her work crosses disciplinary boundaries in interesting ways and finds its expression at these edges of a few disciplinary approaches, among them, media and communication, technology and society, and cultural histories.

As a historian I find what Plotnick calls the ‘hunting and pecking’ through the archives for mentions of ‘the button’ to be very stimulating. There is no ‘archive of the button’, which makes the fascinating quest for these histories of the push button even more remarkable. Plotnick has engaged all her insights into twentieth-century life, culture and society to find these compelling instances of the way we have interacted with button technologies over time. To start with, Plotnick must define what she means by ‘the button’.  ‘Defining what counts in the category of “button”’, Plotnick suggests, involves thinking about the way the finger interacted with the device to make things happen: telegraph keys, typewriters, doorbells, servant bells, elevator buttons, alarms, buzzers … and more.  I found I could immediately connect with the artefact and idea of the button as a new technology by seeing how it was used in the context of domestic service, the home, in hotels and apartments, and the ever-increasing sophistication of the electrified button and the way it became a part of housing and building design. The button even gave rise to professions like the bellhop, now obsolete, in part because of the newer techniques of digital devices.

The figures used in this book are highly interesting images: they remind us to look differently at artefacts we may not readily notice or interpret as objects of historical meaning in the study of technology and human interaction. These include an ornamental bronze front door push from 1888, or a catalogue of push buttons for homes in 1909. These technologies were affordable depending on economic factors, with class defining access to the advantages of the button as technology that separated people into private spaces, or service roles. The fact that the button could be an extension of the body and enable it to perform work at a distance meant that metaphors of the body also created a curiously anxious reading of the power of the button. It confused human with machine or perhaps suggested the body’s own mechanical attributes such as erotic responses to touch.

Whether humans could command power over electrical impulses is another theme investigated here. My own research into mental illness reveals that psychiatric patients were often fearful of ‘automatic’ and electrical devices. This was a world of machines that started to encroach on the manual lives of workers but also families, and whole ways of life. They created frivolous consumers of gum from a vending machine but also made it possible to take a picture with a Kodak camera as early as 1890 in the American context, but not without controversy about ‘amateur’ photography, threatening expert photographers, as Plotnick points out.

Buttons did not always work. The third section of the book examines the flaws and failings of button technology. The end of the period in the 1920s brought new challenges to the concept of human-technology relations, changing meanings of gender, and the distinct creation of a new form of leisure and a leisure class, as well as a growing unease about the dependence on machines. Were people responsible, after all, for the actions of machines? Plotnick has found much rich material, from personal stories to public debates, a wide array of advertising materials, the questions generated by scientific experiments and writings, and more. It is an impressive outcome of her extensive research and insightful analysis. The references listed suggest the diversity of materials used to pull together this story of the button and its increasing power over humans.

Plotnick offers a brief section on ‘Further Reading’. This is a useful, and as she puts it, ‘instructive’ guide, given the many perspectives on the button canvassed by her book. It also offers a neat epilogue to her book in that it reflects on how historical research has investigated social change through themes like electrification, or communication technologies such as telegraphy and telephony. Plotnick also reminds readers of the theorisation of button technologies – despite their lack of visibility in the field – by philosophers such as Baudrillard or De Certau.

This is a wholly engaging and enjoyable book to read. It offers readers reminders to think about who we are and where we have come from as we move into an advanced state of technological dependence. We might reflect on how this began with the simple and perhaps innocent idea of pushing a button to sound a bell for service, among other early uses of the button. Without enumerating all the rich examples here my advice is to read this book to gain a better sense of the value of a humanities perspective on the history of technology that puts people and their practices, needs, fears and imaginations into the story.

Rachel Plotnick’s book should also serve to remind us of the way even our present practices are rapidly being replaced by other forms of technological processes involving our bodies like tapping or swiping a card to pay for something, or to enter a building, at the same time as we have our own physical attributes becoming data for facial or biometric recognition in the emerging world of artificial intelligence controls. Indeed, Plotnick is also part of new research collaborative agendas to think about AI and everyday life. She will bring her expert view of human-technology relations to that task.