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Affect’s Engine is an immersive ethnography of queer people of color on the social media platform Tumblr during its “peak,” from 2010 to 2015. Chronicling a formative time in social media history, Alexander Cho traces the affective patterns and practices of these users, showing how they forged deeply felt, often wordless connections while also cultivating a vibrant politics of resistance to white supremacy and heteronormativity. From “intersensuality” to “attunement” to “haptic wayfinding,” Cho offers a vocabulary to describe these cultures of use that travels across media studies, affect studies, human-computer interaction, and queer of color critique. By paying critical attention to Tumblr’s unique user experience, he argues that the same features that drew queer people of color to Tumblr to feel intensely also explain why the platform struggled to succeed financially: its design did not cohere around the good liberal subject—linear, singular, discrete, orderly, public, and market legible. Cho paints a vivid picture of a vital and bygone internet era, and asks readers to take seriously how affect is shaped by user-facing design on social media.
Alexander Cho is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“Alexander Cho shows what happens when a platform refuses to capture the affects that made Tumblr live for the queer and trans people of color who engined socialities there. Sure, there's elegy here (long live Tumblr!), but also an accounting of the still-living movements of queer desire.”—Shaka McGlotten, author of Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality
“Cho is the world authority on Tumblr, and this book is a brilliant critical reading that takes emotions and sensations seriously. Affect’s Engine is both a deeply historicized, novel account of Tumblr's economy, form, design, and protocols and a love letter to the platform. This beautiful, sophisticated book is the last word on the site that became synonymous with queer online community.”—Lisa Nakamura, author of The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet