Introduction to the Special Issue on Digital Touch: Reshaping Interpersonal Communicative Capacity and Touch Practices

Abstract

We are at a tipping point for digital communication: moving beyond ‘ways of seeing’ to include ‘ways of feeling’. Much as optical technologies transformed sight and the visual (from the telescope and microscope to Google Glass), the rapid expansion in digital touch technologies is set to reconfigure touch and the tactile in significant ways. Advances in haptics, virtual reality and physiological sensing provide new sensory ways of communicating, as well as new ways to capture the quality of touch. These state-of-the-art digital touch technologies promise to supplement, heighten, extend and reconfigure how people communicate. They are re-shaping what and who can be touched, as well as when and how they can be touched, changing existing forms of communication and giving rise to changes in co-located and remote communication between humans, and between humans and robots. These developments sit alongside social discourses of concern and loss, with the digital being associated with the removal of touch from the material sensory landscape [Jewitt et al. 2020]. Yet, in our current climate of social distancing and disengaging with touch in our everyday interactions, the promise of the digital becomes increasingly appealing and significant in re-enabling touch possibilities. As the global population emerges from and comes to terms with their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, these questions become all the more significant. The breadth and interdisciplinary interest in this growing field—across designers, artists, computer scientists, engineers, psychologists and social scientists, with interests in robotics and touch, affective computing, wearables and digital installations—brings attention to the growing need to engage with ‘social’ aspects of digital touch, moving beyond technologies and physiological foci to engage with touch practices [Jewitt et al. 2021]. We argue for the need to think about touch beyond the physiological act of sensing and perceiving to a more rich and nuanced interpretation of touch that takes account of its emotional and psychological significance, the social, cultural and historical evolution of touch practices in human communication, and approaches to touch of the ‘lived, social body as a site of meaning-making, where the skin acts as both a boundary between and a point of connection with others’ [Karpashevich et al.]. Given this landscape, this special issue addresses timely and important questions around the need to think about touch in different ways. This provides a new direction in the field that seeks to address the complexity of human touch and interrogates the limitation of today’s haptic devices. Papers in this special issue contribute to understanding this gap by engaging with socio-cultural