At the intersection between toilets and media, plumbing transforms into a seat and setting where media practices unfold. Toilets, I argue, function as media furniture, both holding bodies and threatening them as "incontinent" containers when media devices fall into the bowl. Situating toilet-media culture in historical context, I investigate how bathrooms-as fraught spaces caught between privateness and publicness and entangled in questions of gender, sex, safety, and health-uneasily afford media consumption. Such a case adds further dimensions to how media scholarship can understand matters of embodiment, materiality, mobility, ability, and everyday life.

As embodied technologies, wearable devices-from fitness trackers to virtual reality head-mounted displays-interact not only with wearers' movements but also interface with their skin and temperature. In so doing, people sweat. Perspiration occurs during physical activity and from close bodily contact and can culturally signify productive body-work or generate "grossness" and disgust. Wearable manufacturers Fitbit and Oculus encourage their users to sweat as a sign of healthy and engaged interaction; however, many users talk about their excretion as human-technology breakdowns that seep, corrode, and disrupt smooth coordination. This article integrates interdisciplinary thinking from media studies, science and technology studies, disability studies, and other fields to discuss how wearability becomes a maintenance and repair problem in wet everyday life. It analyzes discourses within the manufacturers' Internet forums and on Reddit to argue that users clean up, repair, and calibrate their bodies' overflows in care work that gets threaded throughout consumption practices.

This article investigates how computing dis-courses, including user guides, news articles, and advertisements, urged personal computer users in the 1970s and 1980s to preventively care for their devices. Through hygiene recommendations related to eating, drinking, and dusting, these discourses warned that computers' "health" depended upon humans. Importantly, they interpreted care as individual responsibility by putting the onus on users to behave properly. Within this frame, such texts described repairs as unfortunate medical interventions resulting from neglect. The piece argues that computing discourses have histori-cally defined "care" and "repair" in opposition, as acts of doting prevention and undesirable interven-tion, respectively.

This article examines how people have constructed touchscreen smudges, those oily marks left behind by users' fingers on shiny glass, as a form of 'mess'. It offers an historical account of smudges between 2007 and 2010, when users, corporations, journalists, third-party accessory manufacturers and others began to first frame smudges as a problem for mobile media due to users' constant touching and the evidence of their finger trails which functioned as a kind of 'visible tactility'. Solutions took the form of engineering special screen coatings or cultivating responsible users who would maintain their devices through cleaning and caretaking practices. In both these cases, smudges were denigrated not for degrading media content or breaking the device's functionality, but rather for violating high-tech aesthetics and drawing attention to porous, tactile and germ-riddled bodies. The piece, bringing together this case with the present, encourages scholars to attend to the ways that users are entreated to tame and groom both their bodies and their media devices in particular socio-historical contexts.

Looking historically at cleanliness, care practices, and accessories, this article examines how a variety of actors—from record listeners and music journalists to inventors, advertisers, and corporations—grappled with the problem of cleaning vinyl records in the pursuit of “clean sound” in the period between the 1950s and 1970s. Detailing how washing and preserving records became a commercialized, scientific, and often gendered caretaking process for collectors, the piece makes the case for studying under-explored dimensions of music production/consumption related to housekeeping, preservation, and embodied practices. To this end, the article offers the concept of “media hygiene” as a tool for initiating broader discussions in media studies about fragility and the role of mess in everyday media interactions. Thinking with media hygiene provides insight into the ways that people are encouraged to take responsibility for media technologies’ lifespan.

In recent years, scholars have turned their attention to the nexus of mobility, space, and communication practices. At the same time, historians of information and communication technologies (ICTs) have amassed a large body of literature on the history of typewriters and their contribution to gendered office work. To date, however, these two strains have yet to converge. This article thus examines intersections between typewriting, gender, and mobility, focusing on the case of portable typewriters to investigate users' "differential" mobilities before World War II in the United States. In this regard, it reconceives of typewriters as fluid historical objects defined significantly by their social contexts. It calls upon scholars to expand their characterizations of typing beyond thinking only of it as an immobile, desk-based practice and as "women's work." Instead, it draws attention to itinerant male typists as an early class of portable typewriter users who could (and were encouraged to) travel with a typewriter in tow. More broadly, the article also contributes to understandings of mobile media histories beyond mobile phones by demonstrating similar concerns related to portability, usability, and ergonomics in the early 20th century.

Reviewed by: Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computers by David Parisi Rachel Plotnick (bio) Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computers By David Parisi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Pp. 472. At present, technologized touch is subtle and yet seemingly ubiquitous: in the vibrations beneath one's fingers on a smartphone; in the slides, glides, and swipes of a touchscreen; and in the rumbles of videogame controllers one can find technological and electrical experiences designed to stimulate feeling in the hands and to create a "new" kind of tactility in the twenty-first century. David Parisi's Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Hap-tics from Electricity to Computers meets this historical moment and complicates it with a rich, deeply researched and thoughtful analysis spanning the eighteenth century to the present. In Parisi's words, "This is a book about touch's impossible complexity: about the dreams of connecting bodies seamlessly through networks, and about the recurrent efforts to unleash a touch transformed by technoscience as a positive, productive, and liberatory force" (p. xvi). The author's [End Page 1229] task is no small one—to write a history of what he calls "tactile modernity" and the "haptic subject." In the vein of Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer (a history of "recoding" the eye, MIT Press, 1990) and Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past (Duke University Press, 2003), imagining an "ensoniment," an historical moment of conceptualizing hearing and listening in new ways, the book aims to carve a space for a historicized understanding of touch as distinct and unique from other senses. Parisi calls this work a "haptocentric media archaeology," drawing on influential media scholars like Erkki Huhtamo and Friedrich Kittler to make a case for archaeological approaches to history. Yet he also argues for the linear, fairly conventional form the book takes as an antidote to the dearth of work on touch and technology. As Parisi notes, there is currently no canon to resist or existing narrative to complicate. In this regard, Archaeologies of Touch offers readers not only a historical account, but it also tries to carve out a field of study that would provide fertile ground for future scholars. To this end, the text is comprised of five "interfaces" that take readers inside laboratories and corporations to understand how touch has been made legible through scientific experimentation, material technologies, and marketing materials. Parisi's main actors are psychophysicists, physicians, computer scientists, and roboticists. And, while many of his objects of study will be familiar to historians of technology, he makes them new in his work by attending to their tactile dimensions: the Leyden jar, shock therapy, computers, and virtual reality (VR) each take on new meaning through the book's sensitivity to touch. Readers will encounter new and riveting tales, too, in descriptions of devices like the "Teletactor" and the "Vibratese," and in the inner workings of research labs such as the Cutaneous Communication Lab at Princeton (run by Frank Geldard) and the Vibro-Tactile Research Laboratory (run by Robert Gault). One of Parisi's most notable contributions is his coining of the phrase "perpetual immanence" to show that haptic technologies seem always on the cusp of revolutionizing how people interface with machines. His fifth interface details how laboratory studies in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries give rise (though perhaps not always directly or intentionally) to a techno-utopian emphasis on touch in the twenty-first century. Parisi charts how corporations commercialize haptic technologies for mass consumption: examples such as Apple's "Touching is believing" campaign for its iPhone and Oculus (gaming/VR) promises of a revelatory and transformational device each demonstrate a cultural hunger to bring the haptic subject closer to "feeling" the digital. Interestingly, while such a revolution has yet to occur, it is the more mundane uses of haptics in smart-phones and computers that have trained and acculturated users to expect a particular tactile experience with their devices. Archaeologies of Touch is an ambitious book chock-full of fascinating experiments and anecdotes. Parisi demonstrates an impressive command of scientific and technical literature, reading across disparate fields to make [End Page 1230] sense of...

In recent years, concerns have cropped up about the disappearance of analog buttons in favor of flat, slick touchscreens that ask little from their users' fingers beyond swipes, touches, and taps. This form of interfacing has generated concerns both about usability and about how users relate tactilely and affectively with digital media. This article suggests that worries about these discursive and material shifts related to finger force and flat design continue a conversation begun >100years ago when the very concept of a button was new. Stitching together past and present, this study identifies a persistent struggle to make sense of how humans touch and feel machines, with questions about user agency, labor, individuality, and authentic engagement coming to the fore. Additionally, it makes a case for encouraging scholars to work at the intersection of history and haptic media systems.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—well before concepts like usability, user-centered design, or human factors existed—producers and consumers began negotiating issues about pushing buttons. This article details the conflicts that occurred between creators and their users around the push-button interface. While button enthusiasts imagined a new breed of user who could control, communicate, and consume with the simple touch of a finger, reports of actual experiences tell a different story about first-generation button pressers. The study interrogates how rhetoric about buttons as “easy” persists today, overwriting complexities and challenges that occur when interacting with information and communication technologies.