ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the ways computer technology is used in everyday life, and especially how the computer “signature” and look influence many daily practices. It addresses numerous aspects of computer logic as a significant feature of the social matrix of communication. The chapter also focuses on the expanding role of the keyboard in people's lives. It explores the use and utility of keyboards to communicate the ordinariness, orderliness, and bureaucratic reality of people's world, even as it extends to toys and play. Computers are increasingly being thrown at a myriad of problems, largely because decision-makers presume that virtually all problems of human agency can be reduced to speed and efficiency. The rules and logic of interaction, along with the temporal and spatial parameters of this interface, have added yet another specialization to the bureaucracy. A bureaucracy easily incorporates features of computer formats within its own procedures, but it is not overwhelmed by them.
