Politics of Touch in a Digital Context
Responding to Engendering: Gender, Politics, Individuation, by Erin Manning
Manning describes skin as our most sensitive, largest, and perhaps most necessary, organ. We experience tactile sensitivity from our skin through touch, which for Manning, plays an essential role in our behavioral development and survival. Manning’s text describes touch between people and physical, inert objects. It would be interesting to consider how her perspectives on the politics of touch may be different if we consider touching in relation to digital technology.
Emily and I realize that the objects that we interact with, and touch the most, are our iPhones. At this point, we are dependent on them, and touching our screens represents safety, comfort, and familiarity — our phones are more than objects, they are our companions. We posit the question: What does sensation, and all of its potential, mean when the primary objects we touch are inanimate, plastic, and/or inorganic?
The iPhone screen is literally called a ‘touch’ screen, but it is a bit of a misnomer because as users we are programmed to touch it in very specific ways. We are not actually interacting with the screen in the same way that we would interact with a person, or a tactile medium (like clay), or even with inanimate organisms (e.g. plants) in our environment. Instead of touch being a process of sharing with another being, it becomes almost isolating. Our personal interactions with our technology become a process of creating an identity for ourselves, differentiating ourselves from others. Our identities do become connected to our phones, for example, through fingerprint recognition whereby our phone will only unlock if it detects our touch.
Touching our screens is performative: we know that we must touch with the tips of our fingers, we know that we must touch with a certain optimum level of pressure, and we know that the response that we get from the screen will always be the same — cold, flat, smooth, glass. Our touch follows a series of expected responses. We know what will happen when we touch each of our apps, we expect that each screen should change almost instantaneously, and any deviation from this script feels jarring. Thus, our touch is an aspect of our reliance, and we create a co-dependent, almost human, relationship with our technology.
Our phones, tablets, machines become an extension of our physical (and potentially emotional) selves. This is particularly notable in the way that we increasingly interact with other humans through these same screens and phones. We share very intimate moments with others, through our phone, and therefore the phone becomes part of the intimacy. In fact, we even have apps nowadays, like lickthisapp.com, that invites users to simulate oral sex (on a clitoris) using their tongues on the surface of their phones. Another example is the app Couple, which helps long-distance partners stay in touch. Their “Thumbkiss” feature simulates the tactile experience of intimacy, with one’s phone acting as a proxy for one’s partner.
An interesting point is that our technology is gender neutral/non-gendered. We are learning, as a society, how to have very meaningful (reciprocal?) relationships with intelligent non-gendered objects. We do not ascribe gendered expectations to these objects, and we are able to interact with them without relying on gender stereotypes. However, robots like Siri still have ‘female’ sounding voices, as do our GPS systems. Why?
There is no doubt that the politics of touch are complicated by digital technologies, and technology will continue to alter our relationships to other people and objects as we become more integrated with our machines. So, what does this all mean when we consider that our phones and technologies are commodities? What does it mean that our sensory experiences, feelings, and intimacy are so closely tied to capitalism?
By Samaa Ahmed and Emily Lawrence
