Course:MDIA300/Grant Bollmer

Overview

Grant Bollmer is a media theorist and historian of digital culture whose work focuses on how digital technologies shape emotion, identity, and social life. He is an Associate Research Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland and holds a PhD in Communication Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bollmer’s research draws on critical theory, cultural studies, and the history of science to examine the material and cultural infrastructures behind contemporary digital media. Across his writing, he shows how media work through bodies, infrastructures, and everyday practices, helping individuals understand how digital technologies shape experience, power, and the conditions that structure contemporary social life.

His work covers topics such as emotion-recognition systems, selfies, memes, influencers, motion capture, virtual reality, and the economic and cultural dynamics of social platforms. Across these areas, Bollmer emphasizes that digital media are not just tools for communication but systems that organize affect, shape forms of personhood, and produce specific cultural and economic relations.

Key Concepts in Bollmer’s Work

Materiality

Bollmer challenges approaches that treat media as purely symbolic or representational. He argues that media must be understood as material processes that structure perception, experience, and social life. Materiality includes infrastructures, storage systems, interfaces, and embodied practices that “define the limits for meaning and communication” by shaping what can be sensed, known, or expressed within a media environment.

Materialist Media Theory states that power operates through the physical architectures that enable networked communication. Bollmer explains that material systems serve as “locations for the perpetuation of inequality and the management of social difference,” revealing how infrastructures distribute power and shape who can appear within a communication network.

This framework shows how media orient bodies and organize social interaction through uneven conditions of access and participation. By emphasizing materiality as distributed and contingent, he updates earlier medium theory while aligning media studies with contemporary debates about embodiment, infrastructure, and power.

Networks and Power

Bollmer states that networks and power are inseparable. Networks are not merely technical arrangements but cultural and political formations whose material infrastructures shape participation, define value, and structure the terms of social life. Infrastructures such as servers, platforms, and cables actively shape what forms of connection are possible and who can appear within them. In this sense, networks do not simply link pre-existing individuals; they produce subjectivities aligned with contemporary economic and governmental demands. They establish boundaries between those who are valued within flows of data and those rendered invisible or “inhuman” by disconnection.

However, Bollmer argues that contemporary culture should not treat connectivity as a universal solution to social and economic problems, promoting the belief that inequality results from a lack of connection rather than from political or material conditions. This view produces a “political rationality” and such narratives erase the material realities of infrastructures, positioning networks as expressions of human nature while obscuring the uneven distributions of access, labor, and value that structure digital environments.

Affect and Emotion

Affect and emotion are central to Bollmer’s media theory. He notes that emotions emerge from specific historical tools and practices rather than from a universal internal essence.

Because psychological laboratories defined what emotions are, Bollmer shows that modern systems of emotion recognition repeat these earlier scientific assumptions. Technologies such as facial-analysis software or biometric tracking do not reveal emotional truth; they apply the same methods that originally standardized how emotion can be known. These systems make affect legible, classifiable, and useful to cultural and economic structures.

For Bollmer, affect in digital culture is therefore not simply personal or internal. Media technologies actively produce and organize emotion, embedding it within the histories and infrastructures that determine which feelings become visible and how they are interpreted. This framework encourages media-studies students to see affect as fundamentally mediated by the techniques and epistemologies that construct the very idea of emotion.

Impact on Media Studies

Grant Bollmer’s work has reshaped media studies by insisting that scholars treat media as material infrastructures that actively shape politics, bodies, and knowledge. His emphasis on materiality challenges screen-focused or representational approaches by showing how unseen infrastructures, techniques, and technologies define what communication can be and how subjects come to understand themselves.

In Materialist Media Theory, he argues that media are not simply channels for meaning but physical systems that structure perception, temporality, and relation, which expands the field beyond textual interpretation and reframes media as sites where inequality is reinforced and social difference is managed.

Bollmer further pushes media studies toward questions of power by demonstrating how network discourse remakes the human as a function of connectivity, producing subjects who must manage flows of data or risk being rendered “inhuman” within contemporary technological rationalities. Together, these contributions reposition media studies as a discipline that must investigate the material and political conditions that shape experience, identity, and social life.