In two recent essays in The Wilson Quarterly and Harvard Magazine , Tenner describes how the chair, apparently so natural, turns out to be one of our most complex, and least understood, technologies. For one thing, far from being ubiquitous, chairs have infiltrated non-Western cultures only in the past few centuries. The high-backed chair of authority, like certain stiff hats and formal shoes, produces effects in the user no less than in the beholder, he writes. Neither authority, nor conversation, nor wit is the object of today s chair, Tenner adds. It is the manipulation of symbols on cathode ray tubes.
Chairs manipulate our bodies even more insidiously than they do our minds.
This isn t such an uncommon phenomenon, Jared Diamond suggest in Discover . Once a new technology has been widely adopted, it can be extraordinarily difficult to dislodge even if it s later proven inefficient. This familiar arrangement of keys, he writes, condemns us to awkward finger sequences and to frequent alternation of hands. It need not be thus. Ever since the invention of the typewriter, there have been dozens of keyboard designs, including the Dvorak, which allows twice the speed and half the errors.