Grant Bollmer
is a theorist and historian of digital culture.
I am an Associate Research Professor in the department of Communication at the University of Maryland, College Park. My research investigates a wide range of topics related to digital media, including emotion recognition, selfies, memes, influencers, terrible videogames, motion capture, virtual reality and empathy, among many other topics.
I am the author or coauthor of five books. Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection (2016), examines the history of connectivity in Western culture as it crosses the development of technological, biological, financial, and social networks. Theorizing Digital Cultures (2018), provides a model for the study of digital media that synthesizes British and German approaches to media and culture. Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction (2019), attempts to update and revise the claims of Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis in relation to a variety of recent theoretical innovations, especially New and Feminist Materialisms. The Affect Lab: The History and Limits of Measuring Emotion (2023) is a history of the American psychology of emotions through the lens of specific tools used to identify and produce emotion, using this history as a critique of any neurological or biological foundations of “affect theory.” The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube (2024), coauthored with Katherine Guinness, uses the backgrounds of YouTube influencer videos to examine the infrastructures of contemporary capitalism.
Among other awards, I’ve been the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a residency at the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and was a contributor to an issue of the magazine esse: Arts + Opinions on “Empathy,” which received an honorable mention for “Best Editorial Package” from the Canadian National Magazine Awards/Les Prix du Magazine Canadien. Formerly, while I was employed at NC State, I was an NC State University Faculty Scholar, a recipient of the NC State CHASS Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in the Humanities, and recipient of the Robert M. Entman Award for Excellence in Communication Research.
This, however, is perhaps my proudest achievement. The above image is a meme by @cyborg.asm on Instagram, referencing the article “Do You Really Want to Live Forever,” which I coauthored with Katherine Guinness. The original meme can be found here and the article can be found here.
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The Affect Lab: The History and Limits of Measuring Emotion
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Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
$28.00 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-1546-9
$112.00 cloth ISBN 978-1-5179-1545-2
290 pages
45 b&w photos
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
August 2023
Buy it from the publisher, or from Amazon.
OPEN ACCESS EDITION AVAILABLE on University of Minnesota Press’s Manifold Platform.
Reviews can be found in The British Journal for the History of Science, Choice, The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, and This Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
$28.00 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-1546-9
$112.00 cloth ISBN 978-1-5179-1545-2
290 pages
45 b&w photos
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
August 2023
Buy it from the publisher, or from Amazon.
OPEN ACCESS EDITION AVAILABLE on University of Minnesota Press’s Manifold Platform.
Reviews can be found in The British Journal for the History of Science, Choice, The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, and This Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
Examines how our understanding of emotion is shaped by the devices we use to measure it
Since the late nineteenth century, psychologists have used technological forms of media to measure and analyze emotion. In The Affect Lab, Grant Bollmer examines the use of measurement tools such as electrical shocks, photography, video, and the electroencephalograph to argue that research on emotions has confused the physiology of emotion with the tools that define its inscription.
Bollmer shows that the psychological definitions of emotion have long been directly shaped by the physical qualities of the devices used in laboratory research. To investigate these devices, The Affect Lab examines four technologies related to the history of psychology in North America: spiritualist toys at Harvard University, serial photography in early American psychological laboratories, experiments on "psychopaths" performed with an instrument called an Offner Dynograph, and the development of the "electropsychometer," or "E-Meter," by Volney Mathison and L. Ron Hubbard.
Challenging the large body of humanities research surrounding affect theory, The Affect Lab identifies an understudied problem in formulations of affect: how affect itself is a construction inseparable from the techniques and devices used to identify and measure it. Ultimately, Bollmer offers a new critique of affect and affect theory, demonstrating how deferrals to psychology and neuroscience in contemporary theory and philosophy neglect the material of experimental, scientific research.
A Choice Editor’s Pick, June 2024
“Moving compellingly through a series of instruments drawn from the histories of experimental psychology, psychiatric photography, and spiritualism, Grant Bollmer provides an important materialist rebuke to the liberatory strain in affect theory, which frequently treats affect as ‘an eternal truth of the body rather than a momentary fragment.’”
“The Affect Lab argues that beneath affect theory lies media. Far from being natural or biological—and, most fundamentally, far from being universal—affect is the product of the concrete technical operations that are necessary to access it in the first place. By challenging affect theory to examine its own technical basis, The Affect Lab will reboot the field for our times and, in the process, fundamentally change our views of how affect operates and the roles it plays in lived experience.”
“This book is one of the best histories of technology in the field of psychological research to date... Summing Up: Highly recommended.”
“Where the book shines is in the case studies. With vivid detail, each of these invites the reader into a fascinating moment in the history of the science of emotion... Bollmer’s book offers a far-reaching and engaging study of four moments in the history of the emotions. It highlights as yet underappreciated connections between traditions of spiritualism, aesthetics, education, therapy and measurement. It is not a comprehensive survey – but it is not meant to be. This is, in some ways, a strength of the work insofar as it opens up space for further investigation. This book will be of interest to anyone working in the history and philosophy of the human sciences, and especially to anyone curious about how measurement shapes our lives.”
“The Affect Lab makes an incisive critique of affect theorists who take affect as primordial and biological, and of cultural studies scholars and pop psychology writers who treat science as given and ignore its history. Bollmer seeks to make such authors aware of the material and context-dependent aspects of the sciences they so prize, that the technologies do not simply reflect reality but are ‘theories materialized’... Bollmer’s book offers a salutary reminder that that inner life is fundamentally unknowable.
“As a whole...the work builds to a thoughtful and compelling case to take seriously the ways we measure in our construction of what we think affect and emotion is, and the somewhat provocatively chosen examples provide an entertaining and enjoyable entry point to the very human origins of how we think about who we are.”
Since the late nineteenth century, psychologists have used technological forms of media to measure and analyze emotion. In The Affect Lab, Grant Bollmer examines the use of measurement tools such as electrical shocks, photography, video, and the electroencephalograph to argue that research on emotions has confused the physiology of emotion with the tools that define its inscription.
Bollmer shows that the psychological definitions of emotion have long been directly shaped by the physical qualities of the devices used in laboratory research. To investigate these devices, The Affect Lab examines four technologies related to the history of psychology in North America: spiritualist toys at Harvard University, serial photography in early American psychological laboratories, experiments on "psychopaths" performed with an instrument called an Offner Dynograph, and the development of the "electropsychometer," or "E-Meter," by Volney Mathison and L. Ron Hubbard.
Challenging the large body of humanities research surrounding affect theory, The Affect Lab identifies an understudied problem in formulations of affect: how affect itself is a construction inseparable from the techniques and devices used to identify and measure it. Ultimately, Bollmer offers a new critique of affect and affect theory, demonstrating how deferrals to psychology and neuroscience in contemporary theory and philosophy neglect the material of experimental, scientific research.
A Choice Editor’s Pick, June 2024
“Moving compellingly through a series of instruments drawn from the histories of experimental psychology, psychiatric photography, and spiritualism, Grant Bollmer provides an important materialist rebuke to the liberatory strain in affect theory, which frequently treats affect as ‘an eternal truth of the body rather than a momentary fragment.’”
—
David Parisi, author of Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing
David Parisi, author of Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing
“The Affect Lab argues that beneath affect theory lies media. Far from being natural or biological—and, most fundamentally, far from being universal—affect is the product of the concrete technical operations that are necessary to access it in the first place. By challenging affect theory to examine its own technical basis, The Affect Lab will reboot the field for our times and, in the process, fundamentally change our views of how affect operates and the roles it plays in lived experience.”
—
Mark B. N. Hansen, author of Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media
Mark B. N. Hansen, author of Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media
“This book is one of the best histories of technology in the field of psychological research to date... Summing Up: Highly recommended.”
—
M. Uebel, Choice
M. Uebel, Choice
“Where the book shines is in the case studies. With vivid detail, each of these invites the reader into a fascinating moment in the history of the science of emotion... Bollmer’s book offers a far-reaching and engaging study of four moments in the history of the emotions. It highlights as yet underappreciated connections between traditions of spiritualism, aesthetics, education, therapy and measurement. It is not a comprehensive survey – but it is not meant to be. This is, in some ways, a strength of the work insofar as it opens up space for further investigation. This book will be of interest to anyone working in the history and philosophy of the human sciences, and especially to anyone curious about how measurement shapes our lives.”
—
Riana Betzler, The British Journal for the History of Science
Riana Betzler, The British Journal for the History of Science
“The Affect Lab makes an incisive critique of affect theorists who take affect as primordial and biological, and of cultural studies scholars and pop psychology writers who treat science as given and ignore its history. Bollmer seeks to make such authors aware of the material and context-dependent aspects of the sciences they so prize, that the technologies do not simply reflect reality but are ‘theories materialized’... Bollmer’s book offers a salutary reminder that that inner life is fundamentally unknowable.
—
Nadine Weidman, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Nadine Weidman, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
“As a whole...the work builds to a thoughtful and compelling case to take seriously the ways we measure in our construction of what we think affect and emotion is, and the somewhat provocatively chosen examples provide an entertaining and enjoyable entry point to the very human origins of how we think about who we are.”
—
Katie Barclay, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Katie Barclay, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences