Digital Touch Ethics and Values (original) (raw)
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Touching at a Distance: Digital Intimacies, Haptic Platforms, and the Ethics of Consent
Science and Engineering Ethics
The last decade has seen rise in technologies that allow humans to send and receive intimate touch across long distances. Drawing together platform studies, digital intimacy studies, phenomenology of touch, and ethics of technology, we argue that these new haptic communication devices require specific ethical consideration of consent. The paper describes several technologies, including Kiiroo teledildonics, the Kissenger, the Apple Watch, and Hey Bracelet, highlighting how the sense of touch is used in marketing to evoke a feeling of connection within the digital sphere. We then discuss the ambiguity of skin-to-skin touch and how it is further complicated in digital touch by remediation through platforms, companies, developers, manufacturers, cloud storage sites, the collection and use of data, research, satellites, and the internet. Lastly, we raise concerns about how consent of data collection and physical consent between users will be determined, draw on examples in virtual reali...
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2022
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 reshaping 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
Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication, 2019
This chapter discusses social norms with attention to their significance for researching and designing digital touch communication in a global world, notably gendered and cultural touch norms. It explores how social and cultural norms shape the ways that people (and machines) touch. Touch norms are shaped, regulated and enforced through social, economic, familial and legal mechanisms, they organise our experiences and expectations. Understanding of the touch norms that people, including digital touch researchers and designers, bring to their interactions with others provides a route into understanding the sociality that shapes digital touch. We discuss the significance of these given the expectations of the user, their touch repertoires, and the social cultural role that norms play in the take up and use of mediated digital touch communication devices and systems and environments. The chapter concludes that reflexive engagement with touch norms can provide insights and inspiration for thinking about, researching and designing digital touch communication, and help to address how cultural and gendered norms of touch might be engaged with, to constrain and reproduce or open-up the meaning potentials of digital touch.
Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Digital Touch
Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication, 2019
This Chapter explores the potential of the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries for digital touch communication research and design. It defines the social imaginary and discusses how it works to produce and animate shared systems of meaning and belonging that guide and organize the world, in its histories as well as performed visions of desirable futures through advances in science and technology and imagined technological possibilities. The chapter explores the ways in which this concept can be employed as both a design resource, and as a methodological resource. We argue that as new digital touch technologies enter the communicational landscape the setting for interpersonal sociability is/will be reworked. We explore and make legible emerging sociotechnical imaginaries of digital touch, asking how might touch practices be changed through the uses of technology, and how might this shape communication. In particular, the chapter explores the core themes of the body, time, and place in relation to participants' sociotechnical imaginations of digital touch. Turning our attention to the sociotechnical imaginary as a methodological resource, we describe our use of a range of creative, making and bodily touch-based methods to access participants' sociotechnical imaginaries of digital touch and to both explore and re-orientate to the past, present and futures of digital touch communication.
Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
This workshop aims to generate an interdisciplinary research agenda for digital touch communication that effectively integrates technological progress with robust investigations of the social nature and significance of digital touch. State-of-the-art touch-based technologies have the potential to supplement, extend or reconfigure how people communicate through reshaping existing touch practices and generating new capacities. Their possible impact on interpersonal intimacy, wellbeing, cultural norms, ways of knowing and power relations is far-reaching and under-researched. Few emerging devices and applications are embedded into everyday touch practices, limiting empirical exploration of the implications of digital touch technologies in everyday communication. There is, thus, a real need for methodological innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration to critically examine digital touch communication across social contexts and technological domains, to better understand the social consequences of how touch is digitally remediated. This agendasetting workshop will bring together HCI researchers and designers with colleagues from sociology, media & communications, arts & design to address key research challenges and build the foundations for future collaborations.
Touch in digitalized worlds: An introduction
Anthropology of Consciousness, 2024
The English word digital (from the Latin, digitus) etymologically connects both fingers and technologies. In this special issue, we honor this dual meaning of the digital by foregrounding how living in a digital era both challenges and actualizes our senses, particularly our sense of touch. As Classen (2020 [2005]) argues, touch is not a private act; it is fundamental to how people express themselves, their relationship to the worlds they inhabit, and their relationship to others (see also Barker
The Terrain of Digital Touch Communication
Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication, 2019
This chapter provides a descriptive map of digitally mediated touch communication. Whilst acknowledging our everyday interaction with touch screens, our focus is on emergent and semi-speculative touch technologies that want us to be able to touch and feel objects in new ways: from tangibles, wearables, haptics for virtual reality, through to the tactile internet of skin. It gives an overview of current state-of-the-art digital touch technologies, that enable new forms of touch communication in various contexts, such as work, leisure, learning, personal and social relationships and health and well-being. The chapter assess the scope, extent and findings of user studies to date, and identifies emerging issues around the social aspects of digital touch communication, that might involve human-object, humanhuman, human to robot or robot to human touch. In so doing, this map documents the resources for touch, the touch interactions supported and the kinds of touch communication practices that are being designed and identifies the social potentials and constraints of touch that are taken up by the designers of 'digital touch'.
Introduction: Digital Touch Communication
Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication, 2019
In this chapter, we make a case for the significance of touch for communication and suggest that developments in sensory digital technologies are bringing touch to the fore in ways that move digital communication beyond 'ways of seeing' to include new 'ways of feeling'. We argue that this shift requires us to take new measure of digitally mediated touch, or 'digital touch', as a communicational resource, what it is and can be, how it is designed and imagined, and its communicative potentials and limitations. We situate digital touch communication in relation to a technological awakening to a broader social revaluing of people's sensorial experience. We introduce and reflect on the socially orientated stance to digital touch we take in this book, and the InTouch project more generally. The chapter provides an overview of the book which also serves to introduce the key themes that it explores, that is the research and technological terrain of digital touch, social norms of touch, presence and connection, sociotechnical imaginaries of digital touch, and the ethics of touch. Finally, we introduce six InTouch case studies which examine digital touch across different contexts, perspectives and participants. We draw illustrative examples from these (alongside extensive engagement with the research literature) in order to enliven and consolidate the book's exploration of the sociality of digital touch communication across different contexts.
Closing Thoughts, Insights and Resources for Digital Touch Communication Research and Design
Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication, 2019
This chapter closes the book with a note on thematic directions, in response to the speculative and emergent character of digital touch communication, signalling our desire and need to keep the conversation open. We point to the significance of a social take on digital touch, particularly with reference to the types of questions this perspective raises and the way it positions technology in relation to people and society more generally. We draw attention to the research insights on digital touch communication discussed throughout the book that may inform design. Finally, we comment on the theoretical and methodological routes that we have taken to research digital touch communication, and draw on the ideas and research presented in this book to sketch an emergent research and design framework for digital touch communication.
Fingerbombing, or 'Touching is Good': The Cultural Construction of Technologized Touch
My article on the Nintendo DS 'Touching is Good' campaign, recently updated and reprinted in Figures of Touch: Sense, Technics, Body (The Academy of the Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki, 2018). I deepen and extend this argument a bit in the fifth chapter of Archaeologies of Touch, expanding it to include the ad campaigns for other mobile touchscreens like the iPhone.