Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (2004) - Plot & Excerpts
From baby bottles and formula to helmets, Tenner covers nine body technologies and how they have shaped our interactions with each other and the environment. Technologies include: bottles and formula, the ubiquitous zori aka thong aka flip-flop, athletic shoes, ergonomic office furniture, reclining chairs, musical keyboards, textual keyboards, eyeglasses, and helmets. Tenner's book has such an excellent premise and such poor reviews that I really wanted to like it. However, his previous critics are correct that his prose is woefully dry in this book. Many of the chapters read like product histories with very little insight beyond the obvious implications of adopting that technology, e.g. wearing shoes prevents your feet from growing thick calluses thus making you dependent on shoes. And sometimes you don't even get that, as the chapter on reclining chairs fails to address their connection to obesity beyond the slightest reference. In addition to the possible cure-for-insomnia prose, this book would also benefit immensely from additional images throughout the text. Tenner does a good job of describing each invention for those familiar with that object but I found myself looking up many references online because the written descriptions just weren't sufficient for me to picture each one's differences. The placement of the images in the text is also a bit odd, often appearing pages before the actual text on that development. Parts of this book aren't too bad and may be worth reading separately but it is hard to stomach the whole. The introduction about technology being more than electronics and how technology and technique interact might be worth excerpting for a course on technology and society.
I picked up this book for the parts about walking in different cultures, and found that Tenner had concisely and wittily summarized almost everything I had already found in the literature, and pointed me in a few new directions. The quality of the research was so good, I had to read the whole book.And on the whole, the book is very rewarding. I can't give it five stars, though (which in my mind means YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK) for the flaws other readers have noted. There are parts that are too long and dry and obscure for a non-specialist (I'm thinking in particular of the chapter on the reclining chair), and there is a howling need for more illustrations. For many of these technologies, verbal descriptions are not enough.
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