Keywords

In the front pages of this book is a direct imprint of scarred human skin tissue. The image is from a photographic series focusing on the body and touch, which employed what might be described as photographic frottage to print body sections directly. Frottage, meaning to “rub up”, is an art technique dating back more than a century that involves covering a surface in paper and then rubbing drawing material over it to capture a patterned texture on the paper. To produce the image used in this book, the photographic imprint was directly touching (rubbed up against) the body in the space of the darkroom. This performance of touch eradicates distance in the photographic process, including that between the camera and the scene, between the camera and the negative, between the negative and the darkroom, and finally between the darkroom and daylight. In this example, touch is central to visual communication practice and experience, and you might notice throughout this chapter that skin is a central theme in theoretical discussions of photography and the role it plays as a form of touch, creating as it does connections and disconnections both through the image and to each other.

Touch is a part of our everyday social relationships. The exploration of touch in this book moves beyond touch as a physical practice or sensation to focus on “Touch” (with a capital T) as culturally meaningful. Touch is culturally meaningful because more than simply being a thing we do, it is a practice that communicates and defines relationships of bodies in cultural and social structures. In this book, Touch is understood to have physical, emotional, intellectual, political and spiritual meaning. As an embodied practice and experience, Touch is mapped through the concepts of spaces, connection and disconnection, positioning and forms of engagement, where the arrangements and degrees of these concepts have everyday meanings and associations. For example, the way we might accidentally brush past a stranger on a crowded train is different to how we might touch a loved one when they arrive home from their day. Furthermore, when we talk about being touched, it often suggests a meaningful connection rather than a physical interaction.

During the recent Covid crisis, avoiding touch, such as shaking hands and even touching one’s own face, was recommended to avoid spreading the disease. Instead, people sought new ways to greet each other and interact, such as touching each other’s elbows or tapping each other’s shoes. Furthermore, many resorted to video calls for meetings, where people could talk and see each other but felt disconnected to some point without a physical connection. This new reality highlighted how central touch is to our everyday interactions, and how touch acts as a meaningful everyday interaction and gesture.

There is also a long history of touch forming part of a cultural hierarchy, where only certain bodies can touch or be touched. Although such practices are culturally specific, they are always wrapped in combinations of appropriate spaces, connection, disconnection, positioning and forms of engagement. In this way, Touch can act as a form of power, and it can be experienced or intended as violence as well as intimacy.

Socially Networked Photography as Practices of Touch

In everyday contexts, photographs are also experienced and practised as forms of Touch. Photographs are potent practices and objects because they can exclude or include, as well as make bodies and representations visible or invisible. Photographs also have the power to make us laugh, cry or simply recall, and the sharing of photographs connects people beyond words or even the visual elements of the picture. The meaning of a photograph can be at once something a group of people identifies with and yet unique to each individual.

Decades ago, Roland Barthes used the words “skin” and “umbilical cord” (Barthes, 1980/2010, p. 81) to recognise the intimate, personal and cultural meanings of photographs beyond being just a visual mode of communication. The idea of photography as skin has again emerged in Theresa Senft’s (2015) discussions of selfies. Understanding photographs as a skin explicitly locates photography as embodied practice and experience. The boundaries of the physical form or body are skin, and everyday physical touch is considered as the connection between the boundaries of entities. So, describing photographs as skin locates it as part of the embodied self’s expression, identity and experience.

In the context of socially networked photography (the creation and sharing of photographs in digital social networks), skin is not the only metaphor relating directly to socially meaningful Touch. For example, phenomenologist and philosopher Mika Elo (2012) calls for the “digit” in digital to be examined beyond haptics or sensations. Although not focused on networked social media, Jennifer Barker (2009) coined the term “the tactile eye” to describe cinematic sensory and emotional experiences as embodied. And Paul Frosh (2015, 2018), a photographer and cultural theorist, has explicitly described selfies as a form of kinaesthesis, acknowledging them as embodied practices involving movement and the tactility or poetics of social visual practices. Frosh intended the adjective “kinesthetic” not only to align with the idea of selfies as a photographic tactility, but to explicitly include the idea of a digitally networked body in movement, which includes relationships of tactile, visual and social interactions.

Selfies and photographic memes are culturally meaningful and meaning-making practices (Milner, 2018; Senft, 2015; Senft & Baym, 2015; Shifman, 2014; Tiidenberg, 2018). The ideas you may personally hold about selfies and memes (positive or negative) are based on meanings you associate with them. The cultural significance of selfies and memes is located in those associated ideas and meanings. Because of the significance of selfies and memes, they have been subject to extensive online commentary, criticism and debate (Burns, 2015; Tiidenberg, 2018). Academic discussion of selfies and memes as visual communication includes a plethora of terms and descriptions that are, in fact, implicit descriptions of aspects of Touch. The extent of attention and the many proposed terms to describe how we communicate through memes and selfies (implying social relationships of touch) flag an urgency to understand these visual social relationships as cultural practices of Touch.

Considering everyday digitally networked photographic practices such as selfies and memes as Touch recognises them as embodied practices. Highlighting socially networked photography as contextual to relationships of Touch provides a way of mapping the cultural significance of how we connect and disconnect, and the ways that sharing in social networks both enables and constrains bodies and ways of being.

Understanding photographic social relationships as Touch is essential for emphasising an ethics of social relationships in digital contexts, where although agency over self-representation and image-sharing may be enabled, it can also be constrained when images are used beyond the author’s intent. The concept of photographic Touch recognises incremental aspects and levels of connection and engagement as culturally significant and emphasises how social photography can act as both intimacy and violence.

This book is the first of its kind to map Touch as culturally meaningful in digital social networks. Focusing on everyday photographic practices of selfies and memes, I consider how the fundamentals of Touch can be identified in everyday socially networked relationships and how these practices are culturally meaningful.

As a map, this book paves the way for future detailed examinations of Touch in networked photographic socialities and work that will focus more explicitly on user perspectives. This map is also a starting point for future examination of Touch beyond photographic social relationships, extending towards how Touch can reframe our understanding of technology in broader digital contexts of both networked and automated social systems. Understanding socially networked photography as Touch recognises technology as embodied everyday cultural relationships, which in turn demands responsibility for how we treat each other. It also identifies how technology is limited to how humans use, create and implement it in already culturally inscribed relationships and social hierarchies.

Key Terms

The following is a brief glossary of some of the words and concepts I use throughout this book. They may not be new to you, but we must understand them the same way before beginning this journey.

Touch

The physical practice of touching can be described as the state in which two entities or objects are so close that no spaces remain between their boundaries or surfaces, and can involve physical sensations. In this book I focus on the state and sensation of touch as meaning-making in social relationships, where the fundamentals of touch can be used to explore embodied subjects and the societies and cultures in which they live.

Visual Culture

Visual culture studies focus on how people visually communicate and attribute social and cultural understandings through practices of visibility and invisibility. The field of visual culture studies draws on a range of theoretical approaches including structuralism, phenomenology, Marxism, feminism and psychoanalysis. Studies in visual culture include artefacts made to be seen and looked at—such as paintings, movies, photographs, memes and selfies—and people’s ways of understanding and attributing meaning to them.

Practices of Looking, Visuality and Visibility

Practices of looking describe historically and culturally specific ways of seeing, including both the production and consumption of visuality. Practices of looking are inherently political because they shape and constrain what we think it is possible to see, what we are allowed to see, what we are made to see, how we are seen, what is worth seeing, and what is unseen or made invisible. For example, a pivotal basis for discussions of visual practices, Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” (Mulvey, 1989) identifies women represented in films as objects of a male gaze. In this case, the gaze (which I discuss further below) is recognised in gendered power relationships that limit representation. Another foundational work often referred to is John Berger’s book Ways of Seeing (2008), which describes limitations of visuality located in gendered positioning of the male as the viewer and the female as limited to being viewed. Although these examples describe heterosexually gendered power relationships, these key works are often referred to as a basis of exploring a variety of power relationships of visibility.

Visibility deals with the quality or state of being visual, including where certain groups of people may be treated as invisible. Traditionally only certain performances of gender, ability, ethnicity, class and age have been made visible in a variety of media. Movements towards inclusive representation in films and advertising aim to make people traditionally treated as invisible (because of their lack of representation, or limited form of representation) more visible.

The Gaze

“The gaze” is a term describing the social relationships of looking and how looking functions as control. In this book, when I refer to “the gaze”, I am mainly drawing on the work of Laura Mulvey, who examined Hollywood cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. Mulvey argues that active looking was created exclusively from the point of view of male heteronormative viewers and showed how this limited ways of being for women on screen. The power of looking attributed to the male heteronormative viewer is often referred to as “the gaze”, but since Mulvey’s studies, “the gaze” has been explored in further complexity.

Agency

Agency is the capacity or power to act or make meaning on one’s behalf, relatively free from the influence of social forces and the will of others. However, Foucault’s model of power suggests that human subjects are never entirely free agents, but are shaped by and through social institutions and historical contexts.

Modes and Multimodality

Modes of media are things such as written language, the spoken word, images, video, audio or hypertext. Modes also include the elements of visual, aural, oral and touch communication. We communicate differently through all these modes, producing meaning. Multimodality recognises that meaning is best accessed by utilising and recognising the multiple modes of communication media.

Signs, Signification and Signifiers

The concept of signs and signification deals with how meaning is gestured in communicative processes and actions. In social semiotics, signs are considered resources that people adapt to make meaning. The word “resource” is used by social semioticians to avoid the impression that “what a sign stands for” is somehow given or fixed and not affected by use. In social semiotics, resources are signifiers, observable actions and objects drawn into the domain of communication. The way things signify meanings is constituted by past uses and users based on their specific needs and interests, which are always socially and culturally contextual. Context includes the rules or best practices that regulate how resources can be used (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2020; Van Leeuwen, 1995, 2005, 2008). In this book, I engage a social semiotic understanding of signs and signifiers. However, as a cultural studies communications scholar, I use the word “sign” rather than resource.

Codes

Codes are the implicit rules by which meanings get put into social practice and can therefore be read by users. They are the systematic organisation of signs, which can include social rules of conduct like greetings, or styles of social interaction that are culturally located. Language and representational media are structured according to codes, so, for example, lighting, camera movement and editing for productions in a particular genre, period and style are all cinematic codes. Cultural texts, such as selfies, can be encoded with meaning by producers, which viewers then decode.

Performativity

Throughout the book, I talk about performativity concerning participants of selfies and memes. This term describes the ways that people “perform” their identities, where femininity recognised as a social construct and that there are social codes involved in this performance.

Networked Self

The concept of the networked self emphasises the technological self and recognises technological presentations and relationships (connections) as embodied practice.

Embodiment

Embodiment refers to the physical self and the digital (or networked or virtual) self being inseparable. Simply put, we live in technology, not with technology (Deuze, 2011), and because of this, the technological self is understood as embodied. In this book, embodied practice includes how cultural practices inscribe the body as part of social meaning-making; that is, Touch is located as part of the “sensorily inscribed body” (Farman, 2020) of the networked self.

Organisation of the Book

Following this introduction, Chap. 2 considers key definitions and discussions of selfies and memes as visual social relationships. Close examination of research on selfies and photo-based memes to date suggests that photographic social relationships have evolved as digitally networked practices, where agency can be observed in a struggle. Furthermore, discussions of selfies and memes include gestures and relationships that are culturally meaningful and which point towards an understanding (although not yet explicitly identified) of selfies and memes as Touch. Although memes have been considered as multimodal practice, discussions to date have remained limited to modes of media such as text, video and sound. In Chap. 2, I call for photographic practices such as selfies and memes to be understood as multimodal sensory practices and culturally meaningful relationships. I draw key points and descriptions from current literature on selfies and memes to argue that selfies and memes require further consideration as practices of Touch.

Considering how we communicate through touch, in Chap. 3, I examine what we know about touch and locate how it is understood as culturally significant in everyday social interactions. Touch is identified as multiply significant: physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and politically. Understanding touch in this way means that it is more than simply two bodies, objects or entities meeting. Instead, the points of connection and disconnection, as well as the spaces of identification, are culturally meaningful. Describing the five fundamentals of touch—connectivity, engagement, contiguity, differentiation and positioning—in historical, social and cultural examples sets a basis for how Touch might be mapped in social and cultural interactions.

This also provides the groundwork for Chap. 4, which considers more closely how Touch might be mapped in digital social media contexts. Chapter 4 contributes further to the mapping of Touch for the technological self and social media relationships by examining the ways Touch both enables and constrains bodies and ways of being. I identify Touch as including forms of both violence and intimacy in social media relationships and investigate the role of jokes in these relationships.

The mapping of how Touch enables and constrains is examined through the example of the PrettyGirlsUglyFaces (PGUF) meme and selfies that make up the meme. The PGUF meme consists of a regular selfie juxtaposed with an ugly selfie. This meme and versions of it that appear on various social media platforms have continued in popularity since 2014. Today, versions include the popular meme “You are so beaut-OHGOD!” and selfies on several platforms tagged #uglyselfie, #uglies or #ugly. Significantly, the meme has continued since the social and cultural advent of selfies. The repetition of this conversation indicates a cultural nerve and an interest that is not resolved but shared through connection, engagement and performance.

Central to many memes, including the PGUF memes and related selfies, is the joke. Jokes are an essential part of digital visual cultures. However, far from just “silly shenanigans” to be dismissed, the joke is a powerful communicative tool. The example of the PGUF meme is identified as employing “the joke” to navigate culturally accepted boundaries in the performance of memes. Through these performances and engagement, participants deal with cultural boundaries that both enable and constrain ways of being. The joke is identified for the ways it acts as Touch to enable cultural violence as well as intimate connections.

The chapter proposes three main findings. First, the joke both enables and constrains social relationships. Second, the positioning (one of the fundamentals of Touch) of the PGUF meme is unique and must consider not only platform rules, but also how the rules are informed by broader social and cultural structures. These structures are accessible by mapping Touch. Finally, I argue that because everyday social relationships are experienced as including both violence and intimacy, further research is required to consider the complexity of Touch, since research to date has generally focused explicitly on one or the other.

In Chap. 5, I propose the term “semeful sociabilities” to recognise visual social relationships as culturally meaningful practices of Touch. I define cultural semes as an extension of academic discussions of technological seams. Discussions of technological seams are divided by aspirations of seamlessness—aiming towards technology being seamlessly integrated into our everyday relationships—and seamfulness—driven by a focus on user empowerment and how seamlessness acts as a form of social control. In this context, semefulness, a term first proposed by Anne Cranny-Francis in her work on human–technology physical relationships, focuses explicitly on the significance and meanings of Touch. Identifying social media and the technological self as embodied and drawing on the findings throughout this book, the term “semeful sociabilities” describes networked social media practices of the technological self.

In the concluding chapter (Chap. 6), I outline potential takeaways and future research projections.