Digital Touch Futures

Professor Carey Jewitt (University College London)

(In Person/Priory Road Complex F Block, Room 4F2)

Touch matters. It is fundamental to how we experience and know ourselves, others and the world, and central to how we communicate. Touch is at the vanguard of advances in digital communication technologies and heralds a move beyond ‘ways of seeing’ to embrace ‘ways of feeling’. In this talk, I will map the main contexts where touch is centre-place, and explore how touch is being conceptualised in the realm of the digital. I critically interrogate the social implications of these advances in touch technologies (e.g., haptic wearables, virtual reality, bio-sensor applications, interactive skin, and tactile robotics) including how touch technologies stretch the possibilities of touch, require us to newly-attune and re-orientate to touch and ‘promise’ to reshape touch practices: how we ‘feel’ the world around us - the how, what, whom and when we touch, and, at a fundamental level, what we ‘count’ as touch.

Through a speculative social-lens to I comment on the desired and resisted visions and ambitions for digital touch futures by making legible the emerging ‘socio-technical’ imaginaries of digital touch. I argue that the use of touch technologies has the potential to give rise to new forms of tactile and other sensorial experiences and ways of being in the world. I close by briefly discussing the design considerations, limitations and possibilities of digital touch and conclude with a manifesto calling for the social and the sensory to be a felt part of our digital touch futures.

Bio

Carey Jewitt is Professor of Technology and Interaction at UCL Knowledge Lab, Dept of Culture, Communication and Media at the IOE UCL’s faculty of Society & Education. She is also Chair of UCL Collaborative Social Science Domain. Carey’s work explores how the use of digital technologies shapes communication and interaction, engages with interdisciplinary methodological innovation and contributes to the development of multimodal theory. Carey is Director of InTouch an ERC Consolidator Award which investigates the sociality of digital touch technologies. She has led interdisciplinary research projects funded by the ERC, ESRC, EPSRC, British Academy and a number of charities. Carey is a founding editor of two SAGE journals, Multimodality & Society, and Visual Communication. Her recent publications include the book, Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication (2020) and articles including in New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, ToCHI, Frontiers in Computer Science, Qualitative Research, and The Senses and Society.