Resowing the Seeds of War: Presidential Peace Rhetoric since 1945

Abstract

could look like for our digital experiences of the public screen (275). He argues that engaging in a polyculture of modes requires space and time, which is itself available only differentially along axes of privilege like class and gender. Jenkins suggests some short but evocative proposals, like regular, paid sabbaticals or recognizing the value that users bring to social networks through pay. But more than the specific suggestions, Jenkins argues against the deficiencies of modal monocultures and for a more expansive, ecological understanding of how affect is experienced in digital media. In conclusion, Surfing the Anthropocene offers timely insights into specific digital media cases as well as proof of Jenkins’ overarching claims about digital affect, the Big Tension, and modes. Scholars interested in digital media and affect would benefit from reading a book with such theoretical and methodological care. I would be interested in seeing other scholarship extending modal analysis or diagrams of affective environments into other mediated spaces like TikTok or Instagram, whether or not they operated from the primary spatio-temporal modes in the Big Tension. I wonder, however, if each chapter’s ecological metaphor could be more fully integrated into the modal analysis. Chapter three does not rely upon a metaphor at all, and I found myself asking what would happen if we switched the other metaphors around: can Twitter be atmospheric, or Facebook luminous? What affective resonances do these metaphors offer in our understanding of digital media itself? The richness of the modal analysis and the strength of the writing makes this note only a slight one: the theoretical intervention is welcome and the method is sound. In sum, Surfing the Anthropocene accomplishes what it sets out to do in describing and actually analyzing the Big Tension between digital media and the epoch of the Anthropocene. I felt the tension in my own affective response to the book, and by the conclusion not only did I have a more scholarly understanding of the modes of digital media, but a better understanding of my own actualized experience.