Grant Bollmer

I study the history and theory of "digital cultures." In my work, I have examined a wide range of subjects and objects that relate to digital media. My research, however, primarily focuses on the cultural and economic dimensions of social media, the history of psychology, and the theory and philosophy of technology.

I am the author or co-author of five books. This includes: The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube (Stanford, 2024; co-authored with Katherine Guinness), an examination of ultra-rich influencer videos that argues influencer culture reveals a drive to "vertically integrate" oneself and behave as if individuality can become interchangeable with the corporate form; The Affect Lab: The History and Limits of Measuring Emotion (Minnesota, 2023), a critique of affect theory in the humanities and social sciences that makes its claims through key moments in the psychology of emotion and the technologies used to measure emotional experience; Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2019), which updates and revises the claims of Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis in relation to a variety of recent theoretical innovations, especially New and Feminist Materialisms; Theorizing Digital Cultures (SAGE, 2018), which provides a model for the study of digital media that synthesizes British and German approaches to media and culture; and Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection (Bloomsbury, 2016), which examines the history of connectivity in Western culture as it crosses the development of technological, biological, financial, and social networks.

Additionally, with Yigit Soncul, I'm co-editor of a special issue of the journal parallax on "Networked Liminality" (2020). With Yigit Soncul and Katherine Guinness, I'm co-editor of a Post45 cluster on "Influencer Aesthetics" and the De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Cultures, both of which are forthcoming in the next few years.

Among other honours, I have 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.

Some of my current research examines questions of aesthetic judgement and "bad" videogames, materialism and the occult, the use of generative AI in "brain decoding" and visualizing human thought through fMRI technologies, and, with Katherine Guinness, a project on billionaires and neo-feudalism.