Jason Puskar, UWM Professor of English and Associate Dean for Humanities, is presenting his new book, The Switch: An Off and On History of Digital Humans, on Thursday, February 15 at 6:30 p.m. at Boswell Book Company.

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, The Switch offers 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 of Beautiful Circuits, says: “Deeply ambitious and sophisticate… 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.”

Jason Puskar is author of Accident 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.

Professor Jason Puskar, author of The Switch: An Off and On History of Digital Humans

Thursday, February 15, 6:30 pm at Boswell Book Company