Decades before “Zoom fatigue” broke our spirits, the so-called computer revolution brought with it a world of pain previously unknown to humankind. There was really no precedent in our history of media interaction for what the combination of sitting and looking at a computer monitor did to the human body. Unlike television viewing, which is done at greater distance and lacks interaction, monitor use requires a short depth of field and repetitive eye motions. And whereas television has long accommodated a variety of postures, seating types, and distances from the screen, personal computing typically requires less than 2-3 feet of proximity from monitor, with arms extended for using a keyboard or mouse. The kind of pain Getson experienced was unique to a life lived on screen, and would become a more common complaint as desktop computers increasingly entered American homes over the course of the 1990s and into the early 21st century.
Forty years later, what started with simple complaints about tired eyes has become common place experience for anyone whose work or school life revolves around a screen. The aches and pains of computer use now play an outsized role in our physical (and increasingly, our mental) health, as the demands of remote work force us into constant accommodation. We stretch our wrists and adjust our screens, pour money into monitor arms and ergonomic chairs, even outfit our offices with motorized desks that can follow us from sitting to standing to sitting again. Entire industries have built their profits on our slowly curving backs, while physical therapists and chiropractors do their best to stem a tide of bodily dysfunction that none of us opted into. These are, at best, partial measures, and those who can’t afford extensive medical interventions or pricey furniture remain cramped over coffee tables or fashioning makeshift laptop raisers. Our bodies, quite literally, were never meant to work this way.
Of course, computer-related pain existed prior to the arrival of the first consumer-grade personal computers in the late 1970s. Mid-century mainframes and large-scale minicomputers, with their high energy consumption and cooling needs, whirling tape drives, and clackety teletypes and teleprinters, were known to cause stress on the auditory system. Given the proportionally small number of people who worked directly with computing installations prior to the 1970s, such information is largely anecdotal. However, trace evidence can be found in a New York Times article from November 23, 1969 titled "Noise is a Slow Agent of Death,” which listed "computers and typewriters and tabulators" as just a few of the myriad machines polluting the noisescape of New York City. In the summer of 1970, computer magazine Datamation reported that the National Bureau of Standards released a report on the dangers of hearing loss and computer centers.