User Unfriendly

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

Joseph J. Corn (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

296 Seiten

2011
Johns Hopkins University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4214-0192-8 (ISBN)

Infos

We've all been there. Seduced by the sleek designs and smart capabilities of the newest gadgets, we end up stumped by their complicated set-up instructions and exasperating error messages. In this fascinating history, Joseph J. Corn maps two centuries of consumer frustration and struggle with personal technologies. Aggravation with the new machines people adopt and live with is as old as the industrial revolution. Clocks, sewing machines, cameras, lawn mowers, bicycles, electric lights, cars, and computers: all can empower and exhilarate, but they can also exact a form of servitude. Adopters puzzle over which type and model to buy and then how to operate the device, diagnose its troubles, and meet its insatiable appetite for accessories, replacement parts, or upgrades. It intrigues Corn that we put up with the frustrations our technology thrusts upon us, battling with the unfamiliar and climbing the steep learning curves. It is this ongoing struggle, more than the uses to which we ultimately put our machines, that animates this thought-provoking study.
Having extensively researched owner's manuals, computer user-group newsletters, and how-to literature, Corn brings a fresh, consumer-oriented approach to the history of technology. User Unfriendly will be valuable to historians of technology, students of American culture, and anyone interested in our modern dependence on machines and gadgets.

Autor

Joseph J. Corn is a senior lecturer emeritus in the history department at Stanford University, author of The Winged Gospel: America's Romance with Aviation, and coauthor of Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future, both also published by Johns Hopkins.

Inhalt

Introduction: Our Marvelous and Maddening Machines
1. The Advent of Technology Consumption
2. Buying an Automobile
3. Running a Car
4. Tools, Tinkering, and Trouble
5. Reading the Owner's Manual
6. Computers and the Tyranny of Technology Consumption
Epilogue: The Technology Treadmill
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.12.2011
• Zusatzinfo: 13 Illustrations, black and white
• Verlagsort: Baltimore, MD
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 152 x 229 mm
• Gewicht: 544 g
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• ISBN-10: 1-4214-0192-4 / 1421401924
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-0192-8 / 9781421401928
• Zustand: Neuware