Universität zu Köln

The article deals with a change of observation on media technology. Posing the question, if we can touch the medium itself, the operations of pushing buttons and its work of decision making are showing a wide social impact and a resistance to media theory. The tactile dimension of media are discussed in the concepts of McLuhan, de Kerkhove, Kittler and Winkler as well as in their public images. While in public discourse the button stands for the anxiety, to find no off switch, the reverse angle is found in the science fictions of his elimination. The button as a theoretical modell of parergon and interruption of interruption seems to intercept the medium and forces the observation of a tactile ‚Bildung, wich stands, like the button itself and even like tactility, in the background at the marges of discourse.

German