[Commlist] New book: The Switch - An Off and On History of Digital Humans

We would like to announce a new publication from the University of 
Minnesota Press, which we hope will be of interest.

*The Switch***

An Off and On History of Digital Humans

*Jason Puskar***

*__*

*_https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781517915407/the-switch/ 
<https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781517915407/the-switch/> _*

*__*

*Receive a 20% discount online*:*

*LLF23*

*Valid until 11:59 GMT, 30^th June 2024. Discount only applies to the 
CAP website.

"In this deeply ambitious and sophisticated book, Jason Puskar invites 
us to think more seriously about what happens almost every time we touch 
one of our devices and turn it on or swipe or click. From the 
technologies at our fingertips to the vastly larger networks of politics 
and language that they operate and represent, /The Switch/provides a 
fascinating cultural history of how we have made the modern world, and 
been remade in turn, by the simplest of human actions and the 
connections they enable."—Mark Goble, author of /Beautiful Circuits: 
Modernism and the Mediated Life/

"A dazzling, beautifully written history of a pervasive but seemingly 
unremarkable technology of modern life: the binary switch. Jason 
Puskar’s delightful and important book will fascinate historians of 
media and technology; it should be required reading for anyone curious 
about how fantasies of liberal agency are cultivated in the buttons, 
keyboards, triggers, and toys that make us human."—Justus Nieland, 
author of /Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era/

 From the telegraph to the touchscreen, how the development of binary 
switching transformed everyday life and changed the shape of human agency.

/The Switch/traces the sudden rise of a technology that has transformed 
everyday life for billions of people: the binary switch. By chronicling 
the rapid growth of binary switching since the mid-nineteenth century, 
Jason Puskar contends that there is no human activity as common today as 
pushing a button or flipping a switch—the deceptively simple act of 
turning something on or off. More than a technical history, /The 
Switch/offers a cultural and political analysis of how reducing so much 
human action to binary alternatives has profoundly reshaped modern society.

Analyzing this history, Puskar charts the rapid shift from analog to 
digital across a range of devices—keyboards, cameras, guns, light 
switches, computers, game controls, even the “nuclear button”—to 
understand how nineteenth-century techniques continue to influence 
today’s pervasive digital technologies. In contexts that include musical 
performance, finger counting, machine writing, voting methods, and 
immersive play, Puskar shows how the switch to switching led to 
radically new forms of action and thought.

The innovative analysis in /The Switch/makes clear that binary inputs 
have altered human agency by making choice instantaneous, effort 
minimal, and effects more far-reaching than ever. In the process, it 
concludes, switching also fosters forms of individualism that, though 
empowering for many, also preserve a legacy of inequality and even 
domination.

*Jason Puskar*is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, 
Milwaukee. He is author of /Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and 
the Production of Chance/.


*University of Minnesota Press**| November 2023 | 400pp | 9781517915407 
| PB | £29.99**

*Price subject to change.

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