51ΑΤΖζ

Boswell welcomes 51ΑΤΖζ Professor of English Jason Puskar for an event featuring his latest work,ΜύThe Switch, in which he considers how the development of binary switching, the telegraph to the touchscreen, has transformed everyday life and changed the shape of human agency.

Use https://www.eventbrite.com/e/jason-puskar-author-of-the-switch-an-in-person-boswell-event-tickets-781640587037?aff=oddtdtcreator to register for the event and/or order your copy ofΜύThe Switch.

Puskar’s latest book traces a technology that has transformed life for billions of people: the binary switch. Puskar contends that there is no human activity as common as pushing a button or flipping a switch – a deceptively simple act. Far more than a technical history,ΜύThe SwitchΜύoffers a cultural analysis of how reducing so much human action to binary alternatives (off or on, one or zero, this or that) has profoundly reshaped modern society.

Mark Goble, author ofΜύBeautiful Circuits, says: “Deeply ambitious and sophisticated… 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,ΜύThe SwitchΜύprovides 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.”

Jason Puskar is author ofΜύAccident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance. Puskar earned a PhD in English and American Language and Literature from Harvard University as well as a MPhil in English Literature from the University of Oxford. He is a Professor at 51ΑΤΖζ.