User Unfriendly: Consumer Struggles with Personal Technologies, from Clocks and Sewing Machines to Cars and Computers

Chapter 6: Computers and the Tyranny of Technology Consumption

177 Chapter 6 Computers and the Tyranny of Technology Consumption In 1984 cricket townsend, the president of a personal computer user group in Fremont, California, was angry. What was “the first thing you learned about your computer?” she asked the readers of the group’s newsletter . Was it, she prompted, that there should have been a sign that stated, “buy at your own risk”? how many good program disks have you erased? how many good manuals have you torn to bits because they were of no use? how much of your hair have you pulled out because something wouldn’t work? how many times have you cussed a blue streak? When Townsend unleashed this diatribe, the personal computer was not yet a decade old. “If you thought I was talking about you in the above statement and only you,” she continued, “you’re wrong. If you could see into other members’ homes as they read the above you would see the expression on their faces that said ‘she’s talking about me.’ The point is this,” she concluded. “Everyone goes through the same (pardon my French) hell. You are not the first and will never be the last to feel these feelings.”1 The last time consumers experienced such hell with a new technology had been with the arrival of automobiles earlier in the century. Americans paid a heavy price for their new mobility. They were bewildered as first-time buyers choosing one automobile from the dizzying number of types, models, and makes available. They faced hell again when they first 178 user unfriendly got into the driver’s seat as utter novices and attempted to start, steer, shift gears, and otherwise manage their new machines. They also spent hours breaking fingernails and skinning knuckles while tinkering under the hood when “something wouldn’t work.” And when they sought help and advice from silent instructors or owner’s manuals, they found them opaque, exasperatingly incomplete, or “of no use” at all. By the time personal computers came on the market in the latter 1970s, Americans were too young to remember early automobiles and motoring. Over the years, they had eagerly adopted other consumer technologies : electric stoves, refrigerators, washing machines, power drills, vacuum cleaners, phonographs, steam irons, radio and television sets, to mention but a few. While not everybody possessed all of these machines, and access to any of them depended on income, surveys reveal that especially in the years after World War Two even the poorest households acquired a variety of mechanical, electrical, and electronic devices.2 Indeed, the unprecedented growth in consumer spending in the postwar years depended in large part on people filling their homes and apartments with personal technologies. None of these machines subjected consumers to the kinds of hell cars and computers did. Learning to operate them required little new knowledge or the acquisition of new skills. Consumers already knew how to plug in a new electric drill, popcorn popper, waffle iron, or vacuum cleaner and then how to flip its switch (or manipulate a lever, button, or trigger) to make it work. Managing the on-off interface of such appliances was so simple and easy that people seldom felt compelled to read the manual or instructions. People did not speak of “operating” a popcorn popper or microwave or think of themselves as “operators”; the work attendant to using such technologies is too easy or trivial to warrant such terminology. Some of these machines, refrigerators for instance, did not even have an on-off switch and started running once plugged in to a power outlet. Others, such as cake mixers, blenders, or toasters, may have had an additional control or two enabling users to adjust their speed, temperature, or running time, but consumers were seldom puzzled by such minor complications. Indeed, many appliances, such as electric mixers or power drills, simply mechanized tasks once performed with hand tools. Using an electric cake mixer, cooks combined eggs and flour into batter essentially the same way they previously had using a fork or hand-operated Computers and Technology Consumption 179 eggbeater; woodworkers bored holes with power drills pretty much the same as they had for centuries with brace and bit. Machines were faster and required less muscle power, but the skills of baking or carpentry were not centered on the mastery of machinery; they lay in the knowledge of the qualities and behavior of eggs...