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May 21, 2016 4:16 PM   Subscribe

How Technology Is Changing Our Hands by Darian Leader [The Guardian] Doctors predict that our increasing use of computers and mobile phones will permanently alter our hands. What will this mean for the way we touch, feel and communicate?
“At the same time, doctors observe massive increases in computer- and phone-related hand problems, as the fingers and wrist are being used for new movements that nothing has prepared them for. Changes to both the hard and soft tissues of the hand itself are predicted as a consequence of this new regime. We will, ultimately, have different hands, in the same way that the structure of the mouth has been altered, it is argued, by the introduction of cutlery, which changed the topography of the bite. The edge-to-edge bite that we used to have up to around 250 years ago became the overbite, with the top incisors hanging over the lower set, thanks to new ways of cutting up food that the table knife made possible. That the body is secondary to the technology here is echoed in the branding of today’s products: it is the pad and the phone that are capitalised in the iPad and iPhone rather than the “I” of the user.”
posted by Fizz (34 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm a 39 year-old computer programmer and my left pinky is permanently bent out of shape.
posted by chrchr at 4:23 PM on May 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


Technology has already changed our hands. I look at the hands of my father and every other older man I know who spent their whole lives doing manual labour, and my hands look lithe and delicate in comparison. I don't know if the bones in their hands are actually thicker, but they sure look that way.

And I don't even have a smartphone...
posted by clawsoon at 4:23 PM on May 21, 2016 [9 favorites]


tech needs - NEEDS - to start focusing on ergonomic designs. If I can learn to type 65 wpm on a qwerty keyboard, I can learn to do anything with my hands. Get on it already!
posted by rebent at 4:25 PM on May 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


Okay, so look. I studied classical piano from age 6 until age 20 or so. And the index and middle fingers on both of my hands are noticeably bent outward, probably from 15 years of doing outward reaching and stretching with those fingers as part of my piano practicing.

BUT... THIS IS NOT A TRAIT THAT WOULD BE INHERITED BY ANY CHILDREN I WOULD HAVE!

There's a real conflation and confusion going on in this article about exactly how evolution works. There is absolutely NO WAY that the creation of the table knife (surely that has to be an instrument which existed before the founding of the US?) somehow in 250 years caused a genetic change in the shape of billions of human mouths and how their teeth line up.

Genetic changes takes lots and lots and lots of generations given a chance to succeed or die trying before they become evident. Especially minor changes like the shape of the jaw.

Epigenetics are something else, but even then... I mean, seriously.

Evolution doesn't work in a scale of centuries when it comes to animals like humans. It doesn't even work on a scale of 2, 3, or even 5000 years. If we were to meet humans who were first moving from hunting-gathering to farming in the fertile crescent 10,000 years ago, they would be quite recognizably similar to us in basically every respect.
posted by hippybear at 4:28 PM on May 21, 2016 [63 favorites]


The edge-to-edge bite that we used to have up to around 250 years ago became the overbite, with the top incisors hanging over the lower set, thanks to new ways of cutting up food that the table knife made possible.

I've never heard this. Can anyone cite? It seems too fast. We invented Latin printing presses 500 years ago and we never evolved past eyestrain and myopia. Plus, we invented food surpluses way before that, and our asses still hang on to every last fat cell.
posted by Countess Elena at 4:30 PM on May 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


*screams into the night* LAMARCK!
posted by The Whelk at 4:30 PM on May 21, 2016 [47 favorites]


This will happen because slow texters will walk out into the middle of the road and die. Or is that because I will push them?

So only fast texters and their nimble fingers will survive.
posted by srboisvert at 4:32 PM on May 21, 2016 [18 favorites]


I've never heard this. Can anyone cite?

I guess it refers to C. Loring Brace's theories, mentioned e.g. here: How Forks Gave Us Overbites and Pots Saved the Toothless. Has nothing to do with evolution, other than in the sense that your kids are likely to use the same tools as you do :-)
posted by effbot at 4:45 PM on May 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


> BUT... THIS IS NOT A TRAIT THAT WOULD BE INHERITED BY ANY CHILDREN I WOULD HAVE!

If most humans use computers from a very early age and use very specific hand gestures in doing so, it will permanently change our hands and our relationship to our hands. The article is not claiming that this is INHERITED and of course, kids who happened to grow up not using computers would be the same as always.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 5:03 PM on May 21, 2016 [7 favorites]


Okay, so look. I studied classical piano from age 6 until age 20 or so. And the index and middle fingers on both of my hands are noticeably bent outward, probably from 15 years of doing outward reaching and stretching with those fingers as part of my piano practicing.

BUT... THIS IS NOT A TRAIT THAT WOULD BE INHERITED BY ANY CHILDREN I WOULD HAVE!


Sure it is. I've done zero piano training, and I can get my thumb and pinky in a perfectly straight line (which annoys the missus.) My (hypothetical) children would likely outperform yours in America's Got Thunderdome.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:04 PM on May 21, 2016


> > >The edge-to-edge bite that we used to have up to around 250 years ago became the overbite, with the top incisors hanging over the lower set, thanks to new ways of cutting up food that the table knife made possible.

> I've never heard this. Can anyone cite? It seems too fast.

Too fast by at least two orders of magnitude 100 for evolution, but we have dentists, yes?

Again, I don't think he's claiming we're changing our genotype - our genetic material - but our phenotype - our actual bodies - with these gross and unprecedented environmental changes.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 5:06 PM on May 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


Digging holes for a living will change your hands too. There's no beautiful stage of nature we're deviating from: the past was terrible for most.
posted by DangerIsMyMiddleName at 5:21 PM on May 21, 2016 [11 favorites]


DangerIsMyMiddleName: There's no beautiful stage of nature we're deviating from

There's someone on a paleo diet who's reading this article right now and vowing to raise their children on a strict regimen of atlatls, blowdarts, and flint knapping.
posted by clawsoon at 5:30 PM on May 21, 2016 [13 favorites]


I mean, this is great and all but the gestures and swipes and everything also changes every generation of device with no real intercompatibility - like keyboards are largely the same but aside from carpal tunnel and RSI there's no freak secretaries from the typewriter age with massively powerful hands coming around and slapping justice into the faces of ne'er do wells or whatever this is going on about.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 5:32 PM on May 21, 2016 [15 favorites]


aside from carpal tunnel and RSI there's no freak secretaries from the typewriter age with massively powerful hands coming around and slapping justice into the faces of ne'er do wells or whatever this is going on about.

MARVEL Phase 5: The Typist, coming to a theatre near you in Christmas 2027!
posted by Fizz at 5:39 PM on May 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


Also, haven't women been constantly twistng their fingers and hands to knit, crochet, do needle crafts, sew -- until the last 60 years or so ago, all women, literally all the time?
posted by Malla at 5:51 PM on May 21, 2016 [11 favorites]


I mean, this is great and all but the gestures and swipes and everything also changes every generation of device with no real intercompatibility

Exactly. In ten years people will laugh at movies showing us flicking and tapping and whatevering with our hands in order to make our devices understand us. If a direct brain to smartphone interface hasn't been developed by then you can be sure that your device will be able to read your eyeballs and figure out what it is that you're trying to communicate.
posted by teirnon at 6:02 PM on May 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


Seems like a pretty casual use of words like evolve, but I'm sure it's having an impact on our physical selves, anyway.

My keyboard-and-mouse RSI from the 90's has pretty much been replaced with fingertips that often feel permanently bruised from so much tap-tap-tapping, anyway. Banging on glass can't be good ergonomics. We definitely need a new way, and arguing with a computer voice that doesn't understand me sure doesn't strike me as lower-stress*, at least not for twenty more years.

* Human factors tangent: the other day I had a telephone argument with a (UPS? Fedex? I forget) computer voice that insisted I read my tracking number aloud, rather than type it in. Six times I said "double-you" at the appropriate point. Five times it repeated "D" back to me, and once (probably just to twig me), "U-U". I even tried "Whiskey". By the time I finally got a human operator I was sufficiently pre-warmed up to be bitchy, even though I started the call in the best of moods.

(Oh, look, my five thousandth comment on MetaFilter is a cranky old-man ramble. How appropriate. I definitely need to go outside and not tap on screens now.)
posted by rokusan at 6:08 PM on May 21, 2016 [7 favorites]


I know, I know! Technology is changing our hands so that they hurt when we use technology! Which has been happening the whole time pretty much. Ask me how I, my parents, and my grandparents know! Now it happens to everyone, not just the working stiffs.
posted by Bella Donna at 6:28 PM on May 21, 2016


TFA later withdraws from discussing "how our hands will change due to technology" to instead discuss "how we keep our hands busy", and his suggestions for what that might be are are decidedly low-tech.
Once we recognise the importance of keeping the hands busy, we can start to think about the reasons for this strange necessity. What are the dangers of idle hands? What function does relentless hand activity really have? And what happens when we are prevented from using our hands? The anxious, irritable and even desperate states we might then experience show that keeping the hands busy is not a matter of whimsy or leisure, but touches on something at the heart of our embodied existence.
and
The contemporary vogue for hand-based crafts replicates many of these same contradictions. We are encouraged to counter our apparent alienation in the excesses of the virtual world by returning to traditional activities such as weaving, knitting, model making, gardening, sculpting and general tinkering. Using our hands to make things is supposed to work against the dematerialised universe that we otherwise inhabit, a remainder or a new efflorescence of the grounding, satisfying bodily techniques of the past.
Nor can we blame people for that. A knitted jumper or a rose bush or a piece of clay isn't constantly phoning home to some remote master so that we can be served ads for knitting needles or gardening tools.

Edited to add: not yet, anyway.
posted by Autumn Leaf at 6:39 PM on May 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


maybe our casual use of evolve is causing our ability to use the word "evolve" to evolve
posted by XMLicious at 6:58 PM on May 21, 2016 [5 favorites]


it is the pad and the phone that are capitalised in the iPad and iPhone rather than the “I” of the user

I'm pretty sure Apple has never said the 'i' stands for anything in these product names. And if anything it stood for 'internet' in the name of their first iProduct, the iMac.
posted by Monochrome at 7:12 PM on May 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


I don't know if the bones in their hands are actually thicker, but they sure look that way.

I remember a study from 20-odd years ago that examined professional tennis players (after they were dead, one assumes) and found that their racquet arms were quite a bit heavier and denser than the other arm. So yes.

there's no freak secretaries from the typewriter age with massively powerful hands coming around

Probably just as well.
posted by sneebler at 7:19 PM on May 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


I know where this leads.
posted by RobotHero at 7:24 PM on May 21, 2016


...the perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs; the perfection of chemical devices, digestion; that such organs as hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer essential parts of the human being, and that the tendency of natural selection would lie in the direction of their steady diminution through the coming ages. The brain alone remained a cardinal necessity. Only one other part of the body had a strong case for survival, and that was the hand, "teacher and agent of the brain." While the rest of the body dwindled, the hands would grow larger.
posted by cosmic.osmo at 8:54 PM on May 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


I had a giant callous on my ring finger for years and my finger bent out of shape. It went away when I started typing and stopped using a pen.
posted by Chaussette and the Pussy Cats at 8:56 PM on May 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


there's no freak secretaries from the typewriter age with massively powerful hands coming around and slapping justice into the faces of ne'er do wells

More's the pity.
posted by axiom at 9:06 PM on May 21, 2016 [5 favorites]


I read a while ago that one noticeable product of the adoption of mobile phones has been a shift in dexterity from the fingers (which would be used with a keyboard or pen) to the thumb. Mobile phone users, in short, have more dextrous thumbs than the ancients who touch-typed on QWERTY keyboards.
posted by acb at 4:12 AM on May 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


I understand that back when hitchhiking was more common, freakishly large thumbs were a useful trait.
posted by TedW at 6:21 AM on May 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


Jetsons did it...

S01E22 Dude Planet, 07:25...


JANE

So, is it any wonder my fingers are all in knots?

DOCTOR

Hmmm.. Typical symptoms.

JANE

Of what?

DOCTOR

Buttonitis.
posted by mikelieman at 7:39 AM on May 22, 2016 [3 favorites]


It's entirely anecdotal, but I feel like I've noticed a generation gap between people who use their index finger to work a remote control and people who use their thumb.
posted by lucidium at 9:01 AM on May 22, 2016




I had a giant callous on my ring finger for years and my finger bent out of shape. It went away when I started typing and stopped using a pen.

For me it was a very prominent bump/angle shape on the top of one side of my middle finger. I thought it was the way my finger was shaped until computers came along and I stopped having to hand write so much. It has greatly reduced in size but it's still slightly deformed.
posted by Jalliah at 9:15 AM on May 22, 2016


I too studied piano for roundabouts 20 years, but it was basketball that influenced my hands more. I practiced piano between 1-6 hours a day, average was 2 until I hit middle school, when it became more like 3 or 4. But boy, absent-mindedly get my third and fourth fingers crunched by a bouncing basketball, yeah, you can still see the wonky large knuckles.

I have very pink nail beds, giving me a natural French manucure, teehee. Increased blood flow from playing piano since my earliest memories (I still recall banging out tunes on it that I made up when I was two years old).

Interestingly, I did also do a lot of typing in elementary school on Commodore 64s and the like. It didn't leave noticeable traces, but that's likely because I treat computer keyboards like a piano. I've always respected the proper form I was taught: wrists elevated, fingers relaxed, type/press from the shoulder, not from the wrist. (It's quite subtle.) Makes a huge difference. I've never had any issues with carpal tunnel, for instance.
posted by fraula at 10:37 AM on May 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


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