My fellowship project is to complete a book entitled Understanding Modes: The Intensities of Media Affect. The proposal is currently under review with MIT Press. The book contends that “modes” play an essential role in human affective experience, especially with the ascendance of digital media, and develops the concept for scholars and thinkers of media and affect. Most readers’ familiarity with the term “mode” likely comes from their digital devices – everything from photocopiers to car stereos to videogames to smartphones have modes – and “modes” has even entered common parlance as a metaphor for human activity in phrases such as “vacation mode,” “work mode,” and “beast mode.” My existing scholarship has applied these concepts to a range of media, including film, animation, memes, social media, and smartphones. This book, my third, offers an extended, theoretical development of modes and their affective intensities.
The title alludes to Marshall McLuhan’s landmark 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. I argue that a full understanding of media requires an analysis of modes, which, rather than extensions, are intensive in the scientific sense, as qualities of matter that inhere internally and are not dependent upon amount or extent in space or time. Modes constitute switches that orient how people affect and are affected by media, that is, what inputs and outputs are registered, interpreted, and expressed. Modes, as each chapter demonstrates, involve intensive qualities such as directionality, tempo, volume, and frequency, and the modulation of these qualities characterizes digital capitalism today.
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