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eBook
The Switch
2023,2024
Overview
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.
Publisher
University of Minnesota Press
Subject
ISBN
9781517915407, 1517915406, 9781452970332, 1452970335
