The Switch: An Off and on History of Digital Humans

Auteur

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.

Texte du rabat

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.

Contenu

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Awake at the Switch

Part I. Start

1. Origin Stories

2. Designing the Button

3. Analogs and Analogies

   Part II. Digital Bodies

4. The Point of Touch

5. Counting on the Body

6. Darth Vader’s Nipples

   Part III. Keyboard Rationality

7. The Keyboard’s Checkered Past

8. Human Types

9. Chording and Coding

10. The Archaeology of Qwerty

    Part IV. Objects of Play

11. The Toys of Dionysus

12. Pinball Wizards

    Part V. Haptic Liberalism

13. The Control Panel of Democracy

14. Switching Philosophies

15. Pistolgraphs

16. First-Person Shooters

    Epilogue: Self-Destruct

    Notes

    Index