Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity

by Edward Tenner

  For all this, the athletic-shoe industry still has a formidable base of designers and biomechanics specialists and may transform itself again. Nike, for example, is continuing to extend the Air sole to cushion more and more of the foot with less foam, and has been developing models with a springy plastic structure that eliminates the need for any midsole. But since most shoes are still bought for mainly nonathletic use, it is uncertain whether the 1980s boom can be repeated. The big future market may be in the sandal wearers of developing countries: in 1998 even Nike announced a new line of low-priced canvas shoes at $15, for distribution only in the Third World.39

  Most seriously for the sneaker industry, it began to lose its cachet with the press in the late 1990s. Without important new “operational” ideas like the Air sole and the Pump, and with the retirement of Michael Jordan from the Chicago Bulls, the industry was losing its dramatic appeal even as individual companies slumped or bounced back. British Vogue proclaimed the “Death of the Trainer” (running shoe), which was turning into “the antithesis of cool … a prop to bluff [one’s] way into the world of hip.” Now the athletic shoe was stigmatized as “bourgeois.” “Fashionistas,” as the fashion historian Valerie Steele has observed, are always seeking something new in sports footwear yet are seldom athletic themselves. One result is the rise of sneaker-inspired high-fashion street shoes that defy the ideology of the technical performance shoe. A designer for the Acupuncture brand disavows sports, proclaiming “vanity and fashion” as his goals. One specimen at a recent Fashion Institute of Technology exhibition that Steele organized was a decidedly nontechnical Prada Sport model with an elastic cord threaded through a pull-through fastener. On the same theme, the French company No Name produces a shoe with a canvas upper mounted on a thick ripple sole like a row of cylinders, weighted to let the wearer experience new techniques of walking: a cross between a sneaker and a running shoe. Other footwear in the exhibition had beautiful and complex sole designs that would soon have been obliterated by any strenuous activity. A London critic hammered the 1999 Nike Air Zoom Seismic as a “nylon tube” with a “thick coating of style that will look redundant next month” and is designed to degrade its own intricate sole ornament. (Expendability is not a new principle; some women’s dress shoes of the early nineteenth century could be ruined in a single night of dancing.) Leading fashion brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Nautica, and DKNY began to introduce their own lines of designer sneakers through department stores—a trend warily noted by the AFA. Is this the beginning of a new cycle of popularity or a sign of the end of an old one?40

  There has been still more bad news for the industry, the unwanted celebrity endorsers. The Nike “swoosh” logo began to turn up on capsules containing the illegal hallucinogen/stimulant Ecstasy, sold as “Purple Nike Swirl”; athletic shoes at one time were de rigueur at the rave dances Ecstasy helped animate. In 1997 the members of the Heaven’s Gate cult outfitted themselves in new black Nike tennis shoes before their mass suicide, announced on the Internet, as they prepared to rendezvous with extraterrestrials in the wake of the Hale-Bopp comet. Whether it was a sardonic comment on the consumer society they were leaving or an invocation of the manufacturer’s advertising slogan of the time, “Just do it,” the gesture showed the exposure of megabrands to uses beyond the powers of trademark lawyers. In January 1999, the U.S. retail chain Just for Feet ran an advertisement featuring the capture and drugging of a barefoot Kenyan male marathoner by a largely white paramilitary team who lace running shoes on his feet; it provoked accusations and denials of racism and a round of financial troubles and lawsuits. Not that these necessarily harmed sales. In one of the protests against the low wages paid to workers in the factories owned by the shoe manufacturers’ contractors, a rioter at the December 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization was observed smashing windows of the Seattle Nike Town showroom while wearing Nike shoes.41

  OLD SHOE

  The great surprise for athletic-shoe manufacturers at the turn of the century has not been such incidents. It has, rather, been the graying of the sneaker. The AFA reports that younger people are a static or diminishing market, and middle-aged and older people a growing one. Between 1992 and 1998, teenagers’ share of sneaker purchases slumped from 18 percent to 16 percent, college-age buyers’ share was almost unchanged, and twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds’ share dropped from 24 percent to 20 percent. The greatest growth was among forty-five- to fifty-four-year-olds (who went from buying 9 percent of athletic shoes to buying 12 percent) and those aged fifty-five and up (whose share went from 10 percent to 13 percent). Slippage among younger groups concerns the industry because young people are the most enthusiastic consumers of higher-priced models. As a spokesman for the National Sporting Goods Association observed, “If a fifteen-year-old sees his or her parents wearing a pair of Nikes or a pair of athletic shoes, they think, ‘That must not be so cool if my parents are doing it.’” The trend also suggests that sneakers may be coming full circle after a generation or two. In 1961, the recently elected California attorney general Stanley Mosk looked into a newly notorious and allegedly sinister conservative organization, the John Birch Society, and dismissed it in a letter to Governor Edmund G. Brown as “wealthy businessmen, retired military officers and little old ladies in tennis shoes,” thus launching an immortal cliché. Mosk later recalled attending Birch Society meetings, where those little old ladies “were the first to arrive and the last to leave and they were always making motions—and their feet hurt, so they wore tennis shoes.” But then, older people may have always been more enthusiastic buyers than manufacturers liked to acknowledge. During the 1980 New York transit strike, when wearing sneakers to and at work first became fashionable, one specialty store manager was struck by “the old ladies leaving the store in red, white and blue and orange shoes.”42

  The popularity of athletic shoes in an aging society raises the question of whether they are healthier than the footwear they have displaced. Although running-shoe manufacturers retain some of the world’s leading biomechanics specialists, a group of researchers at Concordia University in Montreal, including the physician Steven E. Robbins and the engineer Robert Gouw, have challenged assertions that contemporary running shoes are safer than yesterday’s sneakers, especially for older wearers. In a variety of laboratory conditions, they have found that older volunteers are more likely to lose their balance in footwear with softer midsoles. They have pointed to other studies suggesting that injuries were 123 percent higher among runners wearing the most expensive shoes than among those equipped with the cheapest models. Softer soles appear to encourage higher impacts during running, as thick, soft mats in gymnastics result in 20 percent to 25 percent greater impact on landing. Advanced midsoles, these researchers argue, promote subtle misjudgments by reducing the sensory feedback (proprioception) that runners and walkers get each time a foot makes contact with a surface—the feeling we get of where we are and what we are doing. Robbins, a barefoot running enthusiast, has cited a number of reports suggesting low rates of impact-related foot injury among barefoot athletes and customarily unshod populations. Like people with neurological disease, runners can damage their feet when feedback is inadequate. Shoes also tend to interfere with the natural extension and contraction of muscles and tendons. Athletes unconsciously tend to land harder to improve stability by compressing the material. Runners and walkers wearing hard-soled shoes, on the other hand, unconsciously adopt a better technique, bending knees and hips more deeply and getting natural shock protection in dipping slightly closer to the ground. Further, Robbins has argued, arch supports interfere with the natural cushioning of foot bones. More recently, he has even suggested that not the intrinsic properties of the material but “deceptive” advertising by manufacturers may be to blame for injuries. Volunteers landed with significantly higher impact on a surface when told it was designed for especially effective absorption of shock. The mystique of protection, Robbins and his coauthor argued, encourages people to t
ake greater risks.43

  Robbins’s ideas are intriguing, but they are disputed by other bio-mechanics specialists. The one study he cites of actual runners uses data from 1983 and 1984. Laboratory research can suggest human performance in training and competitive conditions, but very little has been published about the everyday safety of sport-shoe designs. Shoes differ not only in cushioning materials and thickness but in outsole and upper materials and even lacing patterns, all of which may affect injuries. Manufacturers point out that Robbins and his colleagues have tested only a small number of midsole designs. Specialists outside the industry say that trial and error is a better shoe-buying strategy than choosing the lightest and cheapest brand. Yet as some of Robbins’s critics acknowledge, his results may help develop better shoe designs even if his conclusions are unproved. Indeed, there has long been a small group of serious runners who have their own techniques for slicing out cushioning and supports with razor knives.44

  Robbins and his collaborators are not so far from their critics’ positions as they sometimes seem. They realize that barefoot running is not an option for most people in industrial countries. They also recognize that older people rate thin, hard soles much lower in comfort than younger people do. And in their study of footwear and balance in the elderly, Robbins and his coauthors had to concede that on the balance beam used in the test, walking barefoot resulted in instability 171 percent more often than did walking in shoes with thin, hard soles—and 19 percent more often than walking in shoes with thick, soft soles. Bare feet may be hazardous to the health of the elderly; doctors should suggest to older patients with a history of falls that they “avoid barefoot locomotion completely, and wear footwear with hard soles at all times when upright.” If further research confirms their conclusions, sneakers with high-traction rubber soles may replace our grandparents’ hazardous smooth-soled slippers. And running-shoe manufacturers, always alert to changing markets, will no doubt create a new generation of dynamic-looking, firmer-soled but comfortable sneakers for aging baby boomers, especially those who join the growing number of senior runners. Just as it helped link inner-city culture with suburban sports fandom, the sneaker may connect the youth movement of the 1960s, the fitness boom of the 1970s, and a new elder culture that is still in its infancy.45

  And what of the sneaker as a global shoe? A recent National Geographic magazine article on Pakistan illustrates a barefoot rural schoolboy, ship-breakers (dismantlers of oceangoing vessels) apparently in sandals, and sneaker-wearing students at an exclusive boys’ secondary school in Lahore. But it also quotes a young, American-educated progressive landowner who no longer wears his San Francisco—bought sneakers in the fields but prefers indigenous khusas, slippers of pliant kidskin that, as he relates, let him “feel the soil through the soles of my feet and know, as I walk the land, just what to plant where.” Footwear can promote not only biomechanical performance but the body techniques by which we relate to the earth.46

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sitting Up Straight

  Posture Chairs

  JUST AS BILL BOWERMAN was testing new soles in the late 1970s, industrial designers and architects were planning a new generation of office seating. High-performance sneakers and chairs—instruments of the active and the sedentary life, respectively—might seem to have little in common. One moves with us, and the other generally stays put. (Wearable seating has won design prizes but rarely appears on the market.) But for the techniques of the body, seating is to the back what shoes are to the feet. Chairs both reflect and shape how we move and how we rest. Like shoes, they can become intimately linked with their users, extensions of the self, molding themselves to our bodies but also reshaping the people they contain. Shod people and chair-sitting people, even in agricultural and artisanal societies, are already transforming themselves technologically, beginning to fuse with the objects around them.

  The television commentator Andy Rooney has described this feeling insightfully. For thirty years, he wrote in 1989, he had used a leather living room chair that would have been more than three sizes too large, if seating were sold like shoes—as he believes it should be. Because his legs could not bend if he sat back, he sat “slumped way down in it with my legs resting on a footstool,” a position so relaxing it induced sleep. Yet he hesitated to give the chair away, partly because it had become so shabby, but also because it had taken his shape “the way a pair of shoes finally conforms to the shape of your feet just before you have to throw them away.” Discarding it would be like putting an ailing but beloved dog to sleep. Having made chairs in his home workshop, Rooney observed that no matter how much measurement, study, and thought one puts into a chair, it can be tested only by actually building it. By then it is too late to modify the shape.1

  Shoes and chairs have been linked not just in popular culture but on the frontiers of science and design. It was no coincidence that the tighter men’s and women’s shoe fashions became in the mid- to late nineteenth century the greater the interest in comfortable furniture. As the English costume reformer Ada S. Ballin wrote in 1885: “It is only natural that when progression is so painful, as I have known it to be in fashionable boots or shoes, people should prefer to remain at home on an easy chair or on a sofa.” At the origins of modern ergonomics, the German-born Zurich paleontologist and anatomist Hermann von Meyer (1815–1892) wrote not only the first popular scientific work on shoe fitting, starting the movement for healthier footwear, but also a pioneering article on the mechanics of sitting and its implications for school furniture. In our own time, both athletic footwear and seating have combined traditional and new materials, from canvas and leather to (beginning in the 1960s) synthetic meshes, to simplify production and improve performance. In 1968, the American designer Richard Neagle even invented the first armchair with a vacuum-formed plastic shell—coincidentally it was called the Nike chair. Its cushions, like the midsoles of many later athletic shoes, were of polyurethane foam. The English designer Jasper Morrison claimed inspiration from the padding of his girlfriend’s Prada loafers for the upholstery of his Low Pad armless lounge chair, now in the Tate Modern museum. And as we will see, the premium version of Niels Diffrient’s new office chair uses a gel earlier employed in some sneaker midsoles.2

  AN EXCEPTION BECOMES THE RULE

  While most complex societies have developed some kind of footwear, only a minority of world cultures used chairs until a century or two ago. Even in Europe, movable furniture spread only in the Renaissance and early modern period, and chairs were beyond the reach of many well into the eighteenth century.

  Before the chair spread around the world, humanity had the greatest repertory of postures of any species. Other animals acquire and transmit tool-using behavior culturally, but their positions and movements have not appeared, so far, to vary from one region to another. Humanity is the only species that can tell its young to sit up straight, or otherwise. We can shape not only our own posture but the behavior of other animals into gaits they may not regularly adopt in nature, down to the high-stepping maneuvers of the Lippizaner horses of Vienna’s Spanish Riding School. Human technology also opens new resting possibilities for other animals. I once saw a tame parrot in Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo that enjoyed lying on its back, feet clasped together, as a docent slid it down a concave polished bronze railing. Cockatoos can even learn to roller-skate.

  In a landmark article in 1957, the anthropologist Gordon W. Hewes observed that humans can sit, squat, kneel, and stand steadily in about a thousand ways. These are only the static positions; only limited documentation exists of walking, running, and jumping styles. While many Western travelers have brought seating furniture with them into the field, others have discovered the rationality of some traditional ways. In South America, the U.S. explorer William Beebe learned the Indian technique of squatting on his heels. By varying it—changing foot positions and resting his chin, his armpits, or his elbows on his knees—he discovered that he could stay in one spot for hours while re
laxing every muscle. Of human postures, this deep squat may be as widely distributed as chair sitting, being used by about a quarter of humanity when Hewes wrote. It is also closest to the resting stance of the chimpanzee, is comfortable for small children in all societies, and, Hewes speculated, might be a lifelong practice if cultures did not socialize the young into other positions. Among these, chair sitting has been the minority practice, a technique and a technology that originated about five thousand years ago in the Near East. In Egypt and Mesopotamia, chairs were reserved for high personages, and stools, too, were luxuries. The wealthy spent much of their lives at ground level. Workers had no seating. In the remarkable miniatures of the tomb of a senior official of Egypt’s Old Kingdom in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, butchers, bakers, weavers, and scribes work either standing or squatting. Even in the New Kingdom, luxurious chairs were often broad and close to the ground. (On the other hand, Egyptians rich and poor could not sleep well without headrests that we would consider the height of discomfort.)3

  In Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, the Arab conquests ended the prestige of the chair for a millennium. Wood was rare and precious in Arabia, but leather and wool were affordable. Elevated sitting was mixed with reclining on a variety of cushions and raised platforms; even the words divan and ottoman are Middle Eastern in origin. When we find an illustration of a sixteenth-century Ottoman official sitting on a Renaissance X-frame (Savonarola) chair, it turns out to be an English convert to Islam, Hasan Aga, originally Samson Rowlie. An early-nineteenth-century illustration of the Ottoman governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha, receiving Western European advisers depicts the governor sitting cross-legged on a raised, cushion-backed, carpeted platform; the Ottoman advisers are standing, and a scribe sits on the floor. The Europeans are sitting with their feet on the floor.4