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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Touch matters. It is fundamental to how we know ourselves and each other, and it is central to how we communicate. Digital touch is embedded in many technologies, from wearable devices and gaming hardware to tactile robots and future technologies. What would it be like if we could hug or touch digitally across distance? How might this shape our sense of connection? How might we establish trust or protect our privacy and safety?
Digital Touch is a timely and original book that addresses such questions. Offering a rich account of digital touch, the book introduces the key issues and debates, as well as the design and ethical challenges raised by digital touch. Using clear, accessible examples and creative scenarios, the book shows how touch – how we touch, as well as what, whom and when we touch – is being profoundly reshaped by our use of technologies. Above all, it highlights the importance of digital touch in our daily lives and how it will impact our relationships and way of life in the future.
The first work of its kind, Digital Touch is the go-to book for anyone wanting to get to grips with this crucial emerging topic, especially students and scholars of Digital Media and Communication Studies, Digital Humanities, Sensory Studies, and Science and Technology Studies.
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Seitenzahl: 403
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Figures and Table
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. What is Digital Touch?
Why touch matters
Digital touch and the technoscape
An expanded view of touch
The touching body
A multimodal and multisensory lens on digital touch
Overview of the book’s content
Book content
Examples and vignettes
The book’s arguments and themes
2. A Shifting Digital Touch Landscape
Setting the scene
Social contexts of digital touch
Entertaining touch
Communicating touch
Caring touch
Educating touch
Working, commerce and retail touch
Considerations and debates for a shifting digital landscape
Replication versus symbolism
Reconfiguration of touch experience
Re-placement of digital touch
Reconceptualizing touch
Re-engaging with touch
Re-visiting ethical debates
Current landscape and foundational themes for digital touch
3. Discourses of Digital Touch
Touch past, present and future
Who is talking about touch?
The media
Public
Technologists
Seven discourses of touch
Touch is natural and good for our wellbeing; will digital touch be?
Touch is key to our identity, and digital touch will be too
Human touch is in crisis. Digital technology is in part to blame! Or could it help?
Touch is connection and special. The digital can bring us closer. The digital should leave touch alone!
Touch helps us to think and learn. Digital touch can support us
.
All touch is risky and digital touch is the worst!
Digital touch is exciting and new: I can’t wait to get my hands on it
Discourses of touch and digital touch matter
4. Remote Digital Touch: (Re)shaping a Sense of Connection
Personal relationships, connection and digital technology
A desire for digital touch
The introduction of digital touch as building connection
Connecting (and disconnecting) through digital touch
A touch to connect
Connecting through shared tactile messaging
Sending digital hugs to connect
Considerations, losses and gains for digital touch connection
Bodily sensory touching engagements
The temporalities of digital touch
Degrees of reciprocity
Context and situating digital touch
The ethics of digital connection
Establishing digital touch connections
5. Evolving Touch Practices
Touch practices
Emerging digital touch practices
Touching things: practices with objects
Touching others: communication practices
Changing trajectories of touch
Implications for touch practices
Reconceptualizing touch
Reshaping skilled practices
Tensions of homogeneity versus diversity
Touch practices revisited
6. Future Speculations on Digital Touch
Why speculate on digital touch futures?
Circulating speculative digital touch futures
Feeling the future of digital touch
Vignette 6.1: Interactive skin for communication
Vignette 6.2: A haptic chair to communicate remotely with friends and family
Vignette 6.3: Contactless touch for immersive reality experiences
Digital touch imaginaries: three emergent themes
Desired and resisted visions of digital touch
The ethics of digital touch
Bodily human and technology relationships
The power of speculating
7. Designing the Social Future of Digital Touch
The social implications of what digital touch is designed
Digital design that rethinks notions of touch
An expanded vocabulary for digital touch design
Design to extend the sensing, moving body
Moving digital touch designs beyond touch mimicry
Diverse digital touch design
Digital touch design futures
Conclusion
Manifesto for digital social touch in crisis
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 6
Table 6.1
: A continuum of design dimensions based on desired and resisted visions of digit...
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1:
The haptic feedback system: The fingertip sensor/feedback actuators are made of ...
Figure 2.2:
The PHANToM Omni device (from Selmi et al., 2013). The device stylus represents ...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1:
Florence (age 3) and Edith (age 1) visiting their great-grandparents during the ...
Figure 3.2:
Photograph of the baby monitor packaging. Photo credit: image taken by the autho...
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1:
Tactile Emoticon prototype. Prototype design (left). A participant exploring mit...
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1:
Participant grasping a rock in
The Climb
; handling a butterfly in Hold th...
Figure 5.2:
Glove from Remote Contact Exhibition, Invisible Flock. Photo credit: Ed Waring (...
Figure 5.3:
The Owlet sock and base station; sock on participant baby’s foot. Photo c...
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1:
MobiLimb – a touching robotic finger that can be added to mobile devices ...
Figure 6.2:
Astral Kiss by Ellie Doney (2022) part of ‘The catalogue of touch’...
Figure 6.3:
Stills from a speculative film made by Cohrt as part of Project Re:Connect, deta...
Figure 6.4:
A still from the film
Aseptic Synesthesia
by artist Inês Norton (2...
Figure 6.5:
A speculative advert for Pure Skin (dated 2071). Photo credit: created by the au...
Figure 6.6:
Haptic Chair prototype. Photo credit: taken by the authors.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dedication
This book is dedicated to Professor Richard Noss, who founded UCL Knowledge Lab.
Digital Touch
Carey Jewitt and Sara Price
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Carey Jewitt and Sara Price 2024
The right of Carey Jewitt and Sara Price to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5663-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5664-9(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023950920
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Figures and Table
Figure 2.1: The haptic feedback system
Figure 2.2: The PHANToM Omni device
Figure 3.1: Florence (age 3) and Edith (age 1) visiting their great-grandparents during the Covid-19 lockdown; and, mediated touch – how to hug in lockdown
Figure 3.2: Photograph of the baby monitor packaging
Figure 4.1: Tactile Emoticon prototype
Figure 5.1: Participant grasping a rock in The Climb; handling a butterfly in Hold the World
Figure 5.2: Glove from Remote Contact Exhibition, Invisible Flock
Figure 5.3: The Owlet sock and base station
Figure 6.1: MobiLimb – a touching robotic finger that can be added to mobile devices
Figure 6.2: Astral Kiss by Ellie Doney, part of ‘The catalogue of touch’ by Lili Golmohammadi
Figure 6.3: Stills from a speculative film made by Cohrt as part of Project Re:Connect, detailing the ‘Footsie’ design prototype
Figure 6.4: A still from the film Aseptic Synesthesia by artist Inês Norton
Figure 6.5: A speculative advert for Pure Skin (dated 2071)
Figure 6.6: Haptic Chair prototype
Table 6.1: A continuum of design dimensions based on desired and resisted visions of digital touch
Preface
Our collaborative focus on digital touch prompted our work on InTouch, a five-year project exploring the social implications of digital touch technologies for communication, which underpins this book. This focus emerges from our shared interest in how the body is brought into digital interactions and how the intersections of body and technology shape communication. We travelled different disciplinary routes to digital touch, our journeys unfolding over a decade or more of research, traces of which you might feel throughout this book.
Jewitt wound a circuitous path through a training in Fine Art and Media, followed by a shift to sociology and an obsession with research methods, then worked alongside Gunther Kress to explore the multimodal dynamics of classroom interaction. This took her to the school Science classroom (Kress et al., 2001), the English classroom (Bourne and Jewitt, 2003; Kress et al., 2004), and later to the changes realized through the use of digital technology (Jewitt, 2008). This work described and analysed teacher and student gaze, body posture, talk, their interaction with textbooks, objects and tools, and the classroom itself as a multimodal sign. Jewitt worked with Kress and colleagues to develop multimodal theory and methods for researching communication and interaction (Jewitt, 2014; Jewitt et al., 2016), with particular attention to how the use of digital technologies reshapes modes of communication and the relationships between them.
Price’s training began in Cognitive Psychology, which sparked an interest in how digital technologies, as forms of new ‘tools’ with their own interactive properties, might change the way we interact and communicate, think and learn. Her work initially looked at the use of computer-animated diagrams for learning about dynamic biological processes (Price, 2002), then moved more into Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) to engage with how emergent technologies (such as tangible technologies, virtual reality, gesture-based or sensor-based interfaces), which were moving interaction away from desktop computing, might re-shape interaction and cognition. She increasingly drew on theories of embodiment to understand how combined physical digital environments can promote novel forms of playing and learning (Price et al., 2003; 2016; Price and Rogers, 2004), science learning (Price and Pontual Falcao, 2011; Price et al., 2014), mathematical learning (Price et al., 2020a, 2020b; Yiannoutsou et al., 2021), and museum interaction (Jewitt and Price, 2019; Price, 2017; Price et al., 2022b).
Our paths intersected over a decade ago at the Knowledge Lab (University College London), one of the UK’s first interdisciplinary research centres on digital technology. The use of digital technologies for learning and communication was expanding and we were both researching their potential and significance for interaction, as well as how their design and use might be enhanced. We shared an interest in how the use of technologies can reconfigure the place and role of bodily modes – gaze, gesture and movement, and what this means for learning, communication and knowledge. This led to a series of collaborative projects on a variety of digital learning environments including mobile apps (Price et al., 2014), tangible tables (Price and Jewitt, 2013), iPads, (e.g., Price et al., 2015a; 2022b; Sakr et al., 2015), across contexts, including schools and museums (Price et al., 2015b; Jewitt and Price, 2019). Bringing our approaches together raised opportunities for methodological innovation and enabled us to develop a powerful lens focused on interrogating the intersection between bodily interaction and technology (Jewitt et al., 2017a; 2017b).
Prior to our collaboration, we both engaged tangentially with touch, primarily through a focus on gesture. Jewitt, for instance, had explored how learners and teachers gestured and handled objects and tools in the classroom. Price had explored hands-on interaction around science learning using a purpose-built tangible table (Price and Pontual Falcao, 2011). Our first collaboration that explicitly studied touch concerned young children’s use of touch screen technologies – iPads and their consequences for mark making and literacy. Our focus was on understanding the losses and gains for digital touch, and showed how the use of the digital changed the types of touch used by the children as well as how the longer, more continuous and complex touch sequences, trajectories and repertoires, which are valuable to early mark making, are supported by the digital (Price et al., 2015a).
Our interest in touch reflects the changing digital landscape. Touch was increasingly heralded as the vanguard of advances in digital sensory communication, and technological advances (e.g., haptic wearables, virtual reality and robotics) were exploring how to expand the reach of touch. We found the expansion of touch to the digital interesting and confusing at a moment when, from a multimodal perspective, touch appeared to be in a moment of flux and transition – from sense to communicative mode. Touch posed a challenge to us as social researchers as it had been neglected by our disciplines, while digital touch was not on the social radar in which engagement with technology was primarily critiqued, often after the event. The digital mediation of touch felt like a ‘final frontier’. The aim of InTouch was to help narrow this immense and widening gap, and to bring a socially orientated approach to the area to contribute to a better understanding of the design, use and social implications of digital touch for our tactile landscapes.
The struggle to get a grip on the enormity and complexity of digital touch was initially overwhelming. We gained a hold on this rocky terrain through a focus on what we considered its ‘central peaks, valleys, capital cities and boundaries’ rather than trying to create a detailed map of everything. This enabled us to filter the key debates on digital touch, pick up the weak signals and see the major directions shaping its futures. This book brings a socially orientated perspective to map this complex landscape, to anticipate and confront the social, political and ethical challenges raised by digital touch.
Our shared interest in interdisciplinary collaboration and methodological innovation enhanced the InTouch project and our capacity to better imagine and engage with the social relevance and potentials of digital touch. Interdisciplinarity is central to strengthening the ongoing opportunities for the social to inform the design and development of digital touch futures. Through the InTouch team we brought together embodied theories, multimodality, sensory studies and ethnography, design and HCI approaches in creative and novel ways. Douglas Atkinson brought expertise in fashion and textiles, HCI, speculative methods and making. Ned Barker, whose research explores the complex relationships between the body, technology and society, brought expertise in (sensory) ethnography, sociology of the body, and futures. Lili Golmohammadi brought design expertise and methods and knowledge of loneliness and touch. Kerstin Leder Mackley brought expertise in a sensory ethnographic approach to the study of everyday experiences, emerging technologies and design futures. Nikoleta Yiannoutsou brought expertise in the design and evaluation of emerging multisensory technologies. This interdisciplinary mix was essential to the project research, and differently so to this book’s rich textured social account of touch. Their work is central to the contribution that this book makes.
Through this book we examine how touch is thought about, imagined and experienced by people. We investigate the aspects of digital touch that matter to people and explore how they improvise around digital touch. Part of this is getting to grips with the skills, practices and knowledge that people draw on to engage with digital touch devices to communicate with one another, to learn and to feel connected. We approach touch technologies as always being embedded in people’s wider lives, and how their use of technologies may require us all to reimagine aspects of our future – our practices, relationships, how we work and live. We are also interested in how engineers and designers work with different aspects of digital touch and the sensory concepts and categories that they draw on to replicate or re-imagine touch.
This book is part of our broader engagement with people’s sensorial experiences and re-evaluation of the roles of the senses, a part of which is a technological awakening to the sensory. The emergence of digital touch can, on the one hand, be seen as a response to the changing social configurations produced through the global economics of work and migration and the desires and need for connection with remote others that this generates, and, on the other, it is a consequence of technological advances and the commercialization of touch. This book engages with the social, technological and economic forces that are driving digital touch and addresses the questions and challenges this poses for touch as a communicative mode.
Acknowledgements
The InTouch project is a European Research Council Consolidator Award (Award Number: 681489), led by Carey Jewitt and Sara Price.
Special thanks and acknowledgement to our colleagues on the InTouch team for their immense contribution to the project: researchers Ned Barker, Kerstin Leder Mackley, Nikoleta Yiannoutsou; postgraduate research students Douglas Atkinson and Lili Golmohammadi; visiting research fellows Dimitri Chubinidze and Robin Samuelsson; and Evy Samuelsson, the project administrator. Their contributions to the work are referenced throughout the book.
We would like to extend our thanks to our InTouch collaborators: Invisible Flock Artist Studio, collaborators on the Remote Touch Contact exhibition; Dr Lisa May Thomas, artistic collaborator on Unlocking Touch; Marloeke van der Vlugt and Falk Hübner, artistic collaborators on Thresholds of Touch; Jürgen Steimle, collaborator on the interactive skin case study, and the ‘Manifesto for digital social touch in crisis’ along with colleagues Narges Pourjafarian, William Frier, Thomas Howard, Sima Ipakchian Askar, Michela Ornati, Sabrina Panëels, Judith Weda and Gijs Huisman; Nadia Berthouze, Aikaterina Fotopoulou and Frederik Brudy, collaborators on the Tactile Emoticon case study, and the UCL Collaborative Social Science domain funding scheme (Social Science Plus) that provided additional funding for this collaboration; Val Mitchell and Garrath T. Wilson, Loughborough University School of Design and Creative Arts, collaborators on the Designing Digital Touch case study. And we thank all those who participated in the InTouch research and events.
Last but by no means least, we would like to thank David Parisi and Mark Paterson (who were anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft of this book for Polity Press) for their extensive, thoughtful and stimulating comments that helped us to refine our arguments and ground them historically; and Mary Savigar and Stephanie Homer, for their thoughts and support throughout our writing process.
1What is Digital Touch?
This chapter introduces the scope of the book and makes a case for why touch matters, particularly as it becomes digitally mediated and enters the technoscape of digital communication. We argue for a social and holistic engagement with touch and propose the term ‘digital touch’ to emphasize a social orientation to touch. We outline our expanded view of touch with attention to the touching body and set out why a multimodal and multisensory lens is essential to progress digital touch. Finally, we give an overview of the chapter contents and introduce the key arguments that we engage with across the book.
Some of us first encountered digitally mediated touch when it crept into our hands and pockets via the mobile phone or via a touch screen in a bank, a museum, at work or at home. For those born in the 2000s, digital touch has always been there, waiting to reveal its potential. This book, however, stretches out beyond touch screens and vibrating notifications that now pervade our everyday sensorium to explore digital touch in the context of more advanced touch technologies that bring greater complexity to touch communication, including tactile robotics, virtual reality (VR), biosensing and wearables. Touch is increasingly at the vanguard of advances in digital communication technologies (Hoggan, 2013) and heralds a move beyond ‘ways of seeing’ to embrace ‘ways of feeling’ that is beginning to stretch the possibilities of how we ‘feel’ the world around us and how, what, whom and when we touch.
Throughout the book we offer a critical and balanced engagement with the significance of touch technologies’ rapid expansion and the ways in which this is reshaping the future landscape of touch. Avoiding a technocentric perspective, we seek to critique and understand the social implications of touch technology rather than to promote or celebrate it, and to critically engage with its potential futures, negative and positive, through our socially orientated approach. We explore if, when and how advances in touch technologies across a range of social and technological domains promise to change touch practices, and what this means at a fundamental level for what people ‘count’ as touch (Jewitt et al., 2021a; Price et al., 2021a). We acknowledge that hitherto, the historicity of digital touch is one high in ambition and promise, and low on delivery, described as ‘suspended in a state of perpetual immanence’ (Parisi, 2018, p. 32). A key argument of this book is that the failure of contemporary haptics to progress and deliver the step change needed is at least in part due to how its disciplinary shaping limits what touch is, how it becomes meaningful and what digital touch might come to be. We explore the social, cultural and political debates of what constitutes acceptable and desirable touch, the implications of a potential digital transformation and the new social forms of touch, other sensorial communication, and ways of being in the world that may emerge with attention to face-to-face and remote digitally mediated touch between people, people and objects or machines. The book addresses questions raised by this emergent digital touch landscape for how our experience of digital touch communication with close and distant others might be newly constituted, and the place of touch more generally. The question of what social problems may be alleviated by the expansion of digital touch remains open, and while we do not address this explicitly, we do point to the different contexts for which it is being designed and explore what that means for the place of digital touch technologies in our world. Rather we ask, what would it be like if we could hug or touch across distance? How might it shape our sense of connection? What bonds might be formed or lost? How might we establish trust or protect our privacy and safety? What might this mean for communicative norms, etiquettes and ethics?
Why touch matters
Touch is the first sense through which people apprehend their environment (Fulkerson, 2014; Montagu, 1971; Paterson, 2007). While touch is less spoken about (in comparison with vision and speech), it is central to human experience, culture and communication. Touching provides us with significant information and experience of ourselves and one another, is essential to our development (Field, 2003), and central to communication: ‘Just as we “do” things with words so, too, we act through touches’ (Finnegan, 2014, p. 208). Touch is an important means of enacting social relations including greetings – shaking hands and embracing; intimate communication – holding hands, kissing, cuddling and stroking; and more negatively in correction – punishment or restraining (Al-Shamahi, 2021; Linden, 2016). Touch is commonly used to communicate emotions and has a role in communicating complex social messages of trust, receptivity, and affection as well as nurture, dependence and affiliation. Indeed, touch is considered the clearest of all non-verbal cues (Reis, 1998) and is able to communicate a range of emotions effectively via specific touch actions (Hertenstein, 2002; Hertenstein et al., 2009). Touch has been shown to effectively influence people’s attitudes and create bonds with people and places (Price et al., 2022a), and interpersonal touch has been shown to improve information flow, result in a more favourable evaluation of communication partners and increase compliance (Field, 2003). The type and strength of a relationship between people affects how much and where on the body people think it is appropriate to touch (Lee and Guerrero, 2001). Touch is particularly significant in close or intimate relationships; it is shown to create and strengthen bonds between couples and is correlated with overall relationship and partner satisfaction (Gulledge et al., 2003), with a lack of touch having negative connotations (Gallace and Spence, 2010). Touch has positive and negative effects on work-based relationships (Simmering et al., 2013), with enormous potential in regulating workplace relationships (Fuller et al., 2011). While the action of touching another is typically straightforward, many factors influence the message being communicated, for example, the firmness with which a person cups another’s hand can be supportive or aggressive, the perceived bodily warmth (or lack of), the amount of movement or stillness in the touch, the body part used to touch or be touched, all demonstrating the broad, nuanced space of touch communication.
Touch is also crucial for our relationships with objects and tool use (Fulkerson, 2014) and fulfils social functions that serve to construct our experience of the world. Importantly, touching provides people with information about objects (e.g., texture and temperature), and supports perceptual understanding. Skilled touch is a theme central to how people create and make meaning (Malafouris and Koukouti, 2022; Samuelsson et al., 2022). Meaning-making through touch is constructed in interaction with others in particular cultural contexts, giving rise, not only to sensory forms of communication, but also to etiquettes around which touch is allowed: where, when, how and by whom. Indeed, knowing how to infer meaning from touch is considered the very basis of social being (Dunbar, 1996). Touch is thus socially grounded (Parisi, 2018), and closely connected to our emotions (Classen, 2012), creating a complex design space for touch technology to mediate affective experiences.
New social arrangements including migration, increased work mobility and changing norms of family life, have led to partners, friends and families living apart, often separated by long distances and periods of time. The resulting loss of social touch is a challenge for interpersonal interaction and communication. While people use a range of communicative technologies (e.g., video calling) to connect with distant friends, family and partners, these primarily communicate explicit information (Hassenzahl et al., 2012) rather than intimacy or relatedness. These technologies lack the physicality of touch (Haans and IJsselsteijn, 2006), which in the context of close relationships is seen as problematic, ‘the voice is not enough. The relationship is so physical and visual’ (Neustaedter and Greenberg, 2012, p. 755).
During the global Covid-19 pandemic, social distancing regulations or lockdown measures came to regulate social life for the mainstream population in unprecedented ways (such restrictions are mainstream for other regulatory regimes, from no-touch policies in various organizations, through to the extreme of incarceration). For many, this experience newly foregrounded the significance of interpersonal touch, primarily through its absence. Newspaper headlines, on ‘affection deprivation’ and ‘touch hunger’ abounded and underlined what became for some a key dilemma of the pandemic; the inability to be physically close or comfort each other through touch. The pandemic drew wider attention to the links between touch and wellbeing as well as the dialogic character of touch and its potentials for connection. It also raised the question of how touch might be digitally mediated – people were missing touch; could the digital come to the rescue?
Digital touch and the technoscape
In this book we use the term ‘digital touch’ rather than ‘haptics’, which is commonly used in Engineering, Computer Science and Human–Computer Interaction (HCI). Digital touch emphasizes our social orientation to touch and embraces a broad range of digitally mediated touch sensations and experiences, and technologies. Digital touch signals that our starting point, disciplinary lens and primary concerns differ from those of haptics. The starting point for haptics is technological development. It explores touch, including what is termed ‘social touch’, through a psycho-physical, psychological and neuroscientific lens. Much of haptics is concerned with the perceptual and physiological processes of tactile discrimination (McGlone et al., 2014), although more recently haptics has turned its attention to the affective functions of touch, notably in relation to interpersonal or ‘social touch’ (i.e., touch between two or more people) (Huisman, 2017), the questions and disciplinary lens that it brings are technologically orientated, focus primarily on the individual, the classification of touch types, emotional expressivity and digital actuation and modalities, with the goal of informing technological design. In contrast, our starting point is the social, the multimodality and the multisensory, with attention to the interaction between the touching sensing body, the social context or environment, and technology. Sensorially, we approach touch as encompassing other (verbal, visual, proxemic) cues, the complexity of touch being distributed throughout the body (including but not restricted to movement pressure, temperature and pain, proprioception) (Classen, 2005; Paterson, 2007; 2021). Socially, touch is embedded in societal, community and individual lived experiences, cultures and contexts, emotions and histories, touch norms, etiquettes and practices (Jewitt et al., 2021b; Leder Mackley et al., 2020). This leads us to take an extended view of touch (outlined later in this chapter). Our goal is to understand the social meanings and implications of the emergent digital touch landscape, and to provide social insights of use to the design and take up of digital touch futures.
Throughout this book we see technologies as being inextricably entwined in our lives – our relationships, how we communicate and interact and so on, and technological innovation and the social therefore work to mutually shape and transform one another (Madianou and Miller, 2013). Technologies are intrinsically linked to the ways in which physical, temporal and emotional distances are thought of and managed through the affordances (potentials and constraints) that they offer our communicational repertoires. At the same time, the material, social and cultural histories, practices and contexts that people bring to their use, including the personal social relationships that they are taken up within, constantly shape technologies (Jewitt, 2008). In short, social relations and communication technologies mutually shape each other as they are developed and maintained. Baym (2015) refers to this as the ‘social shaping’ perspective, a middle ground between technological determinism (technology influences society) and social constructivism (society influences technology). Like Baym, we argue that new or emerging digital touch media offer opportunities for social and cultural reflection on the new connections that this mutual shaping gives rise to.
Against this backdrop, at a time when touch screens are arguably ‘transforming our embodied experience of sociality and material culture’ in a variety of contexts (Richardson and Hjorth, 2017, p. 1664), digital technologies are being both celebrated for keeping people ‘in touch’ and dismissed for falling short of the connection associated with human, physical touch (Drouin, 2022; Turkle, 2013). Indeed, social commentators have blamed the digital in itself, albeit to different extents, for diverting us away from human touch (Field, 2003). Parisi (Haptics Club podcast, Huffman et al., 2021) critiques another popular narrative, that because of the neglect of touch by contemporary media, our sense of touch is declining. He argues that this narrative is being mobilized by some in haptics to create a rationale and market for the development of digital touch, that is, to fulfil the lack of touch that consumers experience by bringing digital touch newly into media. The desire to replicate human touch within haptics is related to a common social critique of the digital mediation of touch as problematic amid concerns that the digital seeks to replace or degrade human touch (or at least risks doing so) and offers easy superficial experiences that raise concerns about the paucity and pretence of digitally mediated ‘touch’ (e.g., Turkle, 2013; White, 2023). We suggest that a central aspect of much of the dystopian and utopian debates around digital touch is related to the extent to which haptics is focused on understanding and creating real (fidelity) experiences through physical stimulation and/or illusion that mimic the sensation of naturalistic human touch. We return to this debate later in this chapter, and throughout the book.
While advances in haptic technologies enable new ways to remotely communicate a feeling of touch (Berger et al., 2018), digital touch devices are unable to replicate the cutaneous and kinaesthetic properties of physical touch (Steimle, 2016; van Erp and Toet, 2015), and most typically rely on vibration, pressure and temperature. Nevertheless, these degraded touch cues have been shown to be successful in creating meaningful tactile experiences (Huisman et al., 2016; Parisi, 2018; van Erp and Toet, 2015), and in triggering emotions akin to those attached to existing physical touch practices (Candy, 2019) (e.g. hand-holding) and have the potential to bring sensory benefits to distant communication (van Erp and Toet, 2013; 2015). Yet touch, being a complex but critical sense in human interaction and communication, presents an ongoing challenge for technological design and development, notably how to embed digital touch into social sensory contexts of established touch communication (Price et al., 2022a). (Chapter 2 maps the rapid expansion of digital touch and complexity of this touchy terrain.) A social and sensory perspective argues that aspects of digital touch are so intimately tied to our existence, and technology is so broad in its reach and its impact so profound both in practical and philosophical terms, that digital touch should not be left to engineers and computer scientists alone (Wilson, 2007). Throughout the book we explore the digital remediation of touch and its potential to stretch the possibilities of how we ‘feel’ the world around us – the how, what, whom and when of touch, and concerns about the commercial exploitation and commodification of touch. In doing so, we engage in critical and collaborative conversation with those working to advance touch technologies, to narrow the immense gap between social and technical understandings of digital touch and offer empirically grounded social and sensory insights that contribute to the development and design of digital touch.
When a new technology enters the technoscape (Appadurai, 1990), societies reach a consensus over time and develop a set of norms for their use that shape the ways we communicate. With each new technology, the process begins again (Licoppe, 2004). This is not to suggest that digital touch is on a straightforward linear trajectory of progression. There is rather a sense that haptics is itself in something of a stasis, perhaps even a crisis; that it is stuck in a cycle of over-promising (Parisi, 2018), with a fixation on the dream of replicating human touch but lacking the technological underpinnings to make major advancements. However, there is considerable interest in the technologies of touch and their futures, encouraged by the hope of technological advancements (in part linked to improved infrastructures and AI (artificial intelligence) possibilities for machine learning) and the ambition (and immense financing) of the metaverse. So, again we find ourselves on the cusp of a tipping point for digital touch. In this book we point to the impacts of the ways people use technology on the reshaping of meaning-making resources and practices over time (for good and bad) (Price et al., 2013), notably how a range of technologies have amplified or reconfigured touch in our everyday communicational landscapes to reshape what touch can be and become through digital reconfiguration and enhancement.
Exploring digital touch raises interesting questions for how digital touch connection is conceptualized as everyday, pseudo ‘universal’ physical touches or ritualistic touch (handshakes, strokes, kissing, squeezing a hand or wrist, cuddling, hugging), the effort being to simulate existing touch practices through the digital. The kinds of connection that are imagined belong to the non-digital world. A focus on the psycho-physicality of touch, however, conflicts with the ways that digitally mediated touches are transformed, leaving them always lacking, and always lesser, making digital touch second best. A symbolic approach to digital touch understands that touch is not only psycho-physical but works with a broader understanding of how touch can be digitally mediated. This suggests a need/desire for designs of digital touch that augment and extend real-world touch connections and relationships in authentic and ethical ways. Our response to this debate is to argue for the need to seek ways to bring the social to the heart of digital touch development and design and to foreground digital touch that moves beyond direct digital replication or substitution for human touch, towards re-imagining touch differently through the lens of the digital. That is, to create digital touch with the potential to support new forms of connection and attachment, including, for example, remaking the boundaries between bodies, new forms of shareable touch experiences, or even looking to non-human bodies and experiences as inspiration: fancy a set of whiskers to sense the world?
We argue for advances that move digital touch beyond a paradigm of replication/simulation to embrace symbolic touch and engage creatively with new possibilities of what digital touch can be. As understanding and imaginations of digital touch start to extend beyond the confines of direct human-to-human skin-to-skin, to embrace the significance of context, prior touch experiences and the stories we wrap around the ‘kernel’ of a touch sensation … does the physical still matter? We think it does; however, the question of how tenuous, small or momentary that physical touch sensation can be for a user to count their experience as touch remains unclear and will, we suggest, vary depending on context and individuals. As we struggle to find ways to talk about digital touch, we take the current language of touch into the digital realm, but we are alive to the possibility that it is not the same – that our language limits how we think about digital touch. Like other technologies, we suggest that the language of digital touch will evolve over time to reflect and shape its particularities, social use and contexts. One question this raises is to what extent the digital replication of a physical sensation of touch is needed to generate an experience that a person counts as touch and when does the realism of tactile sensation matter (what kind and when does it need to be precise)?
An expanded view of touch
Touch is often seen as being composed of a set of universal sensations related to the direct stimulation of human skin. This physiological framing of touch perception has to some extent been historically shaped by an emphasis on the ‘science’ of touch, which has decomposed touch into specific physiological features that primarily relate to the stimulation of sensory receptors in the skin. Such research has significantly progressed understanding of the tactile features of bodily touch including, pain, temperature, proprioception, pressure and c-afferents, which are central to mediating emotion related to touch. This knowledge is highly valuable and has permeated the field of haptics development. However, it has also established a particular and, to us (from a social perspective), rather narrow view of touch, which we argue has to some extent constrained the development of haptics to physiological tactile sensory knowledge and technologies that stimulate the skin’s mechanoreceptors. As we will show, this way of thinking about touch within the haptics field has fostered a fragmented, bounded engagement with touch through technology.
We offer a different take on touch, an extended view shaped through an embodied and multimodal perspective. Touch is a part of a holistic sensory bodily system that is biological/physiological, social and cultural. This expanded view of touch underpins the arguments of this book to elaborate and explore the meanings and potentials for digital touch and its futures. We engage with four interconnected touch zones – internal touch, direct touch, proximal touch and environmental touch, and the boundaries between them. These zones are well established, although people may use slightly different terminologies to discuss them; however, they are structured differently through the digital. Internal touch (or interoception) is a term commonly used in science, biological literature as well as sensory studies. It refers to internal felt bodily sensations including hunger, thirst, tensing muscles or racing heart. Digital mediators, such as wearable biosensing devices that touch the body through direct skin contact, can bring new awareness to how we are feeling inside, and shape-changing materials (e.g., Karpashevich et al.’s (2022) corset-like garment) that dynamically respond to bodily rhythms (e.g., breathing), bring new perspectives on how we experience (internal) touch through digital experiences. Direct touch (co-located) is a familiar term involving skin contact with another person or thing. Proximal touch, like direct touch, is a well-used term in haptics and media communications literature. It refers to sensing the ‘nearness’ of someone without direct physical contact (sensing someone encroaching on, or more positively joining, your personal space). The boundaries between direct and proximal touch, for example, become blurred; direct touch with a digital artefact itself remains with on-skin contact; however, the ‘touch’ connection with another occurs remotely. Digital jackets embedded with inflation mechanisms, for example, provide a direct sensation of a squeeze on the body to create a sense of being held, yet the ‘hug’ communication is conveyed by another person located remotely. Emergent i-skin devices that can be worn directly on the skin, like digital tattoos, can connect wirelessly with various other devices to augment bodily communication. Digital touch technologies that can enable a sense of someone ‘remote but present’ reflect, but differently realize, proximal touch experiences. Wearable devices in the form of rings or bracelets can, for example, be used to send and receive tactile messages to and from a remote other, bringing a sense of nearness or presence. Mid-air haptics introduce a new form of ‘contactless touch’, which expands the idea of touch to a sensation of air moving across the body. Environmental touch refers to ‘touch’ environments or atmospheres in human geography (Paterson, 2016), and sensory ethnography studies (e.g., Pink, 2009), where the social or physical space may differently shape the touch encounter. We explore this notion in terms of shifting touch trajectories alongside the use of digital touch in chapter 5. We suggest that the digital both remediates the different zones of touch in relation to the sensing touching body and expands its social functions and possibilities.
This extended view moves beyond the physiology of touch to embrace the wider embodied and socially orientated perspectives of touch experience. This matters because it draws a wider ring around digital touch: what it is, how it might be experienced, how it shapes touch practices and identities, and how it is designed, developed and implemented. We argue that this broader socially orientated approach is needed to capture the complexity of touch and digital touch, one that requires moving across and between disciplinary boundaries. Our approach is shaped by a social, sensory and critical stance in which digital touch is situated at the intersection of body, technology and environment, through sense and meaning making, communication and interaction. As digital touch technologies enter the broader landscape of our lives, they also reshape it, a key question being the extent to which they re-orientate, replace, or re-emphasize the role of touch and how it features in our everyday interactions.
This book explores how the social, sensorial, cultural and experiential aspects of digital touch shape meaning making, practices, interaction and communication. We are concerned with questions of tactile agency and control, accessibility, regulation of touch, tactile presence, identity and emotion, and how touch is navigated in personal relationships and various social contexts (e.g., parenting, health, and wellbeing, learning and leisure, and the workplace). The book highlights the many nuances of touch, suggesting the need to rethink what and how we touch and the implications of this for reconfiguring digital touch and its design. We address the importance of a shift in the understanding of technology from functional and mechanistic to embrace context, culture, materiality and emotion, to foster digital touch integration into everyday life. We also recognize and bring awareness to the significance of including the wider body in digital touch research and/or systems design and development; both in terms of wider bodily location of touch interactions and the wider emotional touch experiences that are possible and (un)desirable. In so doing, we point to the need to reconceptualize touch, to understand the complex nuances of touch, and interrogate effective ways to integrate the digital with everyday practices.
The touching body
Touch encompasses other sensory cues (verbal, visual, proxemic) and is distributed throughout the body (through movement, pressure, temperature, pain and proprioception) (Parisi, 2018; Paterson, 2021). This touching body is both embedded in and produced through societal and individual lived experiences, cultures and contexts, emotions and histories, touch norms, etiquettes and practices. Throughout the chapters we offer examples of our explorations of the touching body (Jewitt et al., 2021b; 2021c). The body is at the heart of the sociality of digital touch. The question of what constitutes the body is therefore central to discussion of digital touch futures and the design and use of touch-based digital interaction. For us the body sits within the multimodal, multisensorial, socio-culturally situated space of the extended view of touch. The concept of embodiment we work with stretches across different disciplines (philosophy, body studies, post-structuralism, post-humanism, sensory studies), all of which reject dualities such as mind–body and virtual–physical realities. We align with the view of the touching and feeling body as composed of ‘a field of flesh that includes the somatic senses, proprioception, the vestibular (balance) sense and kinaesthesia in an assemblage that spills out beyond
