Rachel Plotnick's "Power Button"

Rachel Plotnick is an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in The Media School at Indiana University Bloomington. She received her PhD from the Media, Technology and Society program in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. Her research and teaching focus on information, communication and media technologies from an historical and critical/cultural perspective.

Plotnick applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing, and reported the following:

From page 99:

In an article titled '"The End of War," author J.F. Sullivan envisioned a world where "war seemed to grow ever more terrible; until it came to such a pass that a single human being could destroy a whole nation by simply pressing a small button with his finger." As Sullivan imagined, it was not a crazed dictator or power-hungry politician who blew up the world, but rather a bumbling gentleman who unwittingly and effortlessly pushed a button that he happened to encounter without realizing what effects the button would trigger.

This passage details a couple of core themes that repeat throughout the book. First, it points to the fact that dystopian fears have often manifested around button pushing because buttons' effects are perceived to be swift and irreparable - once you push a button you can't undo the process you've set in motion. In this imagining, buttons function more like triggers because they can't be "unpressed." Second, and related, those potentially catastrophic effects can (theoretically) be controlled by any person and by any person's hand. The subtext, here, is that you don't need special strength, skill or knowledge to push buttons, and this notion of universality - anyone can push a button - has made buttons both seductive and terrifying for more than a century.

While manufacturers and advertisers of consumer goods have sold this concept of accessibility to the masses, I note throughout Power Button​ how the potent simplicity of buttons destabilized social relations in really important ways. The act of button pushing occurred in the context of a late nineteenth and early twentieth century society grappling with big questions about machine labor versus manual labor, bureaucracy, and skill, and buttons were perhaps one of the most iconic (and lasting) technologies to come from that time period which challenged what human beings could (and should) do with their hands.

Visit Rachel Plotnick's website.

--Marshal Zeringue