Changed Mode Piece
I started to take out my laptop to charge it, then changed my mind, but it wouldn’t go down to the bottom of the bag because a folder was angled in a way that blocked it. Still holding the laptop in my left hand, I reached for the book pouch – since it was propped up higher than anything else, it was the easiest thing to grab – to get at the charger positioned in front of it. Changed my mind again, and put the laptop back where it now went down properly.
I will take my laptop without any intention of charging it. But when I tried to grab it, it wasn’t a clean grip and slipped, so I decided to leave it in there.
I took the folder of papers out with my right hand. As I was lowering it back into the bag, it hit the lip. While still lowering it, I decided I would take it back out once I got it in. But I couldn’t get it all the way to the bottom of the bag between the book pouch and laptop, so I left it there in its partially-descended position.
I held up the bag from the lip with my left hand to access the front pouch with my right. I decided that if I could smoothly reach in and grab student post-it notes without any stalling in the motion, I would take them out. Instead my hand touched the Airwaves gum. My first thought was that I had to put it back – I had only authorized myself to take out post-it notes, nothing else. But then I decided no – precisely because I had failed to get the authorized item, I had to take out the unauthorized item. It was a necessary reversal: failing the original rule meant I had to implement its opposite.
The Airwaves were resting on the desk. Now, I decided to put the gum back in the bag, taking it in my left hand, but didn’t want to lift the bag with my right hand, so put the gum back on the desk. I picked up my pen to write about this. While writing, I wanted to hold the Airwaves in my left hand, and then hatched a plan to put it directly into the front pouch using my left hand as a wedge to both open the pouch and descend the gum (with the bag still leaning against the desk leg).
I then considered transferring the Airwaves to my right hand to use it as the wedge instead. But while writing about these alternative plans, I realized I needed to verify which hand had originally lifted the bag’s lip and which had reached in. I decided that if my written record showed I had lifted with my left hand and reached with my right, I would allow myself to use the left-hand wedging method. However, in writing about this decision to verify, I had made another assertion about the hand configuration without being completely certain. This created the need to verify not just the original writing but also my recent writing about checking the original writing.
After performing these verifications and finding them correct, I finally had permission to proceed with the left-hand wedging method to return the Airwaves to the front pouch.
Reflection
My mode change transformed a conventional “What’s in my bag” inventory into something more experimental. While my original piece used selected objects to construct a professional narrative (about my teaching, AI use, and linguistic identity), the new version deliberately defamiliarized a different set of objects through detailed attention to physical interaction and decision-making.
What fascinates me is how the two pieces reveal completely different aspects of the same activity (looking in my bag). The first was selective and reflective – I chose objects that could tell a story about who I am. The second became this strange recursive experiment where each interaction generated its own rules. I didn’t even get through everything in the bag because each object opened up so many possibilities for interaction.
As Kress argues, meaning is made through multiple modes beyond just written language. My mode change demonstrates this – moving from purely written description to documenting physical actions and mental processes created entirely different kinds of meaning. As McLuhan suggests, new modes don’t just change how we communicate, they “alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about.” My first piece was interested in what objects revealed about my identity, while the second piece was solely focused on documenting what I actually did with them. This mode change offers both a benefit and a challenge: even though I deliberately created arbitrary rules and pointless manipulations, the resulting documentation reveals something about identity that careful self-presentation cannot. Yet what it reveals resists easy identification of a stable self – it suggests I am only what I do in each moment, even when those actions are consciously artificial.
