Keywords

More than just a physical practice or sensation, Touch is culturally significant and a form of everyday meaning-making. Touch is multiply significant, with social and cultural meanings that can be physical, emotional, intellectual or political (Classen, 2012, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c; Cranny-Francis, 2011a, 2011b, 2013; Jewitt, 2017; Schroeder & Rebelo, 2007). As Constance Classen writes, “Touch is not just a private act. It is a fundamental medium for the expression, experience and contestation of social values and hierarchies. The culture of touch involves all of culture” (Classen, 2020a, p. 1). In this book, I am interested in Touch as accultured meanings and how these meanings are constituted through interaction with other beings and objects in our world. This includes the way meanings are activated by touch, and how these meanings are contextual to the nature of touch and the circumstances in which it occurs. Locating Touch in the topic of selfies and memes therefore recognises that these practices act to document, analyse, understand and modify interactions between our bodies and the environments in which we live.

As I have previously mentioned in this book, the most straightforward understanding of touch is the state whereby two entities or objects are so close that no space remains between their boundaries or surfaces. However, as I began to argue in Chap. 2, drawing on the literature on selfies and memes, this simple explanation includes complex concepts such as boundaries, spaces that involve both inclusion and exclusion, as well as the complexity of connections of the self and networks.

The proliferation of research implying that selfies and memes act as practices of Touch flags an urgency for research addressing socially networked relationships of Touch. As discussed in Chap. 2, my examination of the literature focusing on visual social relationships of selfies and memes exposed how these visually defined practices are (implicitly) identified for the ways they communicate through Touch. Furthermore, the fundamentals of selfies and memes were located as gestural, embodied and multimodal practices. Describing these complexities of Touch, scholars focusing on selfies and memes have used metaphors and terms including skin (Senft, 2015), kinaesthesis (Frosh, 2015, 2018), cuts (Warfield, 2016), prospective photography and hyper-signification (Shifman, 2013, 2014b). For example, skin can be considered as boundaries; cuts as what is excluded and included in the boundaries; and kinaesthesis as a complexity of boundaries, movement and touching. Similarly, cultural gestural interactions of Touch—prospective photography, hyper-signification (Shifman, 2013, 2014b) and appropriation (Milner, 2012, 2018)—have focused on active cultural connections and meaning-making.

Literature focusing explicitly on social relationships as Touch has recognised how touch is socially and culturally significant by drawing on history (Classen, 2012, 2020a, 2020c; Jewitt, 2012; Jewitt, 2011), philosophy (Elo, 2012) and human–technology relationships (Cranny-Francis, 2009, 2011a, 2011b, 2013), and the technological self has been identified as embodied sensory practice (Farman, 2020). However, everyday networked relationships, including visual social relationships such as selfies and memes, remain under-investigated and require further explicit investigation as Touch relationships. Research considering Touch and technology has so far largely focused on material relationships with technology, such as haptics and grasping. There is much work to be done in the area of Touch and technology beyond grasping (Elo, 2012; Jewitt, 2011), such as considering closely how Touch acts as a key and significant mode in everyday interactions and relationships.

Having a cultural studies focus, this book draws on a multimodal social semiotic approach to understanding the social world as it is represented in and through interaction and artefacts. A typical starting point for the multimodal social semiotic approach is to generate a general description of an artefact or sequence of interactions (e.g. a genre, materiality or general structure). This general description is then located in the broader world of representation and communication to define the modes and semiotic resources available in a given situation, how people use them, the choices they make, what motivates these choices and how their choices realise power (Jewitt, 2011).

To address the gap in the literature and gain a deeper sociocultural understanding of socially networked Touch, this chapter first describes the approach to Touch as meaningful, multimodal, embodied cultural practices. Then drawing on the social semiotic framework, the five fundamentals of Touch—connection, engagement, contiguity, differentiation and positioning—are identified for how they are used in everyday examples and histories to produce meaningful social relationships. Finally, the fundamentals are proposed as a type of map that will be used to analyse an example of memes and selfies in Chap. 4. This map is also helpful for guiding further research into networked relationships and the technological self beyond so-called visual practices.

Networked Social Relationships of Touch as Embodied and Multimodal Practices

Networked Practices as Embodied

Touch is an essential element of everyday networked social relationships. In fact, digital social relationships might best be considered as touch (Elo, 2012) rather than as purely visual phenomena (Milner, 2012, 2018; Streeck, 2009). This is because the understanding of visual gesture is driven by the body’s practical acquaintance with the environment as it is lived in, explored and modified.

Digital relationships of selfies and memes are embodied because the body and bodily practices are essentially texts (Grosz, 2020) that are nonlinear and in continual performance (Butler, 2002; Cover, 2015). The performance includes the creation and production of the body within social and cultural orders (Grosz, 2018). Recognising the performance, creation and production of the technological self as continual in everyday practices like selfies, digital cultures scholar Jill Rettberg has employed the term “feed” (Rettberg, 2014, p. 33). Similarly, Paul Frosh (2015) describes selfies as kinaesthesis, explicitly locating selfies as embodied and unfixed or in the process of bodily muscular interactions and creation.

Furthermore, as I mentioned in Chap. 1 (and examined further in Chap. 2), the terms used in the literature to describe selfies suggest embodied touch. For example, “the grab” (Senft & Baym, 2015), “the selfie skin” (Senft, 2015) and “kinesthetic sociability” (Frosh, 2015) are all located in digitally networked social relationships as corporeal or embodied socialities. Skin is an organ of the body, grabbing is foremost an action the body produces, and kinaesthesis is essentially located in muscular movements. Because these concepts are located explicitly as parts of the corporeal body, they are already acknowledging how networked social relationships are embodied and, more specifically, that the visual is experienced as gesture and sensory inscriptions of touch.

Gestures such as grabbing are visually located forms of touch because they are a visual description of the body in an active form of touch. Moreover, embodied experiences in digital contexts have also been recognised for the ways the body is inscribed through sensory practices (Farman, 2012, 2015, 2020), which I extend to include the practices of selfies and memes. For example, touch can be recognised as a sensory inscription (Farman, 2020) in the way the recipient of conversational gesture (in this case, the sending or sharing of memes and selfies) draws on undisclosed understandings of touch in the visual communication process (Streeck, 2009).

Touch then locates the way people communicate through selfies as embodied, providing a way to consider the complexity of visual social relationships of Touch in digitally networked contexts.

Multimodality of Networked Practices

Although memes have been recognised as multimodal media (Milner, 2012, 2018), they have not been recognised as embodied practices that focus on the multimodality of bodies in social relationships. In this book, I acknowledge the multimodality of media but focus on selfies and memes as embodied media, in which, as sensorily embodied (Farman, 2020) practices, the embodied mode of touch is the central point of focus.

The concept of multimodality and meaning-making is inseparable from bodies (Stein, 2007). The multimodality of bodies includes modes like gesture, gaze, posture and movement. Examination of these many modes pays attention to how people use and interpret specific modes to interact, represent and communicate meaning. As embodied practices, networked social relationships of Touch are therefore multimodal.

In this book, Touch in the context of selfies and memes is considered to be multimodal because gestured gaze and movement both function as forms of touch. From a social semiotic point of view, touch is a mode because it realises Halliday’s (1978) three dimensions of metafunctional meaning—interpersonal, ideational and textual—that are essential to defining communications in a social semiotic context (Bezemer & Kress, 2014). Touch meets Halliday’s interpersonal metafunction because it involves interaction with (one or more) specific others and occurs when someone is addressed; it meets the ideational metafunction because touch communicates something about the world; and it meets the textual metafunction because touch is coherent with signs made in the same or other modes to form an interaction. Handshaking, for example, acts as a coherent sign informing interaction.

This book contributes to the exploration of selfies and memes as Touch by examining what is included as touch and the social semiotic meanings associated with the dimensions of touch. Different modes offer different potentials for meaning-making. The potential of a mode is described in social semiotics as its affordance. Modal affordances are connected to the mode’s material and social histories, or its social and cultural purposes and how it is used in specific contexts. The researcher, as an embodied subject, therefore shapes a knowledge of what is understood according to their contexts and identification. Because of these connections, it is crucial as a researcher to remain reflexive. Therefore, aiming towards reflexive research, I wish to note my positioning as a cisgendered woman, identifying as she/her, with a mixed-Italian heritage and living on Australian land.

Mapping the Fundamentals of Touch

The five fundamentals of Touch—connection, engagement, contiguity, differentiation and positioning—were initially defined by Anne Cranny-Francis (2011b) to discuss human–technology relationships in the context of art gallery spaces. These fundamentals are defined simply in Table 3.1. Although not originally applied to networked social relationships of Touch, these five fundamentals are helpful in beginning to map how we might understand such relationships, because they are a basis for how touch acts as an indispensable mode of everyday social relationships. Furthermore, because touch is embodied, and the technological self includes embodied performances of self, the concept of Touch extends to our networked socialities and can be linked to specific research in digitally networked social relationships.

Table 3.1 The (interdependent) fundamental properties of touch, based on Cranny-Francis’s (2011b) examination of human–technology relationships of touch
Full size table

In what follows, I further define the five fundamentals and consider how they can be located in everyday socially networked relationships. In this way, I begin to map the social and cultural significance of digitally networked social relationships of Touch. Specifically, I focus on selfies and memes as digital social relationships, while highlighting that this map can be extended to other digital (and technological) cultural practices in future research.

Connection

The connection aspect of touch is illustrated in the well-known ancient Greek myth of King Midas. King Midas was at first pleased with the gift of the golden touch because the power allowed him to turn anything into gold. However, this excitement quickly turned to disappointment when he was left unable to eat or hug loved ones. This myth highlights the extent of connection afforded by touch between individuals, things and other individuals, and how touch can at once be an act of power or intimacy, and an everyday necessity in actions such as eating (Cranny-Francis, 2013).

Connection is culturally determined or inflected by the distinction of ethnicity, class, gender, ability and age. Dependent on these distinctions, people have social agency to touch or be touched. For example, in the case of class, in some cultural traditions, people in lower classes are considered untouchable and without agency; on the other end of the scale, people with power, such as presidents or royalty, are not to be touched but can touch others if they choose. One well-known example in Australia is the historical blunder of the Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, who touched the Queen of England on her back without consent in her 1992 visit to Australia. The outraged English media dubbed the Australian prime minister “The Lizard of Oz”, suggesting that touching the English Queen was scandalous and socially inappropriate for the Australian prime minister’s station. Another example, found in the Christian bible, tells the story of Mary Magdalene, who sought to be cured by touching the hem of the cloak of Jesus Christ. In this story, touch is spiritual and considered to have the power of healing; in many religions, healing is located in touch, such as the laying of hands. The story of Mary Magdalene also associates touch with class systems because Mary is positioned as a lower-class citizen and considered unworthy to touch the hem of Jesus Christ’s cloak. Through connection with the spiritual figure, the unworthy (in this case, Mary Magdalene) is cured. However, in the example of the English Queen, touch is thought to have sullied the prestigious figure. Connection in these examples is based on hierarchies of class, bodies and cultural understanding of social interactions of touch.

The way we touch each other is significant. In the case of companion species, including humans, tactile contact is fundamental for social interaction (Haraway, 2003). Touch has emotional connotations and has been recognised for the ways it “creates a platform off which trust can be built” (Dunbar, 2010, p. 263). The building of trust relies on communicative interaction involving permissible types of touch, which may include degrees of intimacy or violence (Ascione & Lockwood, 1997; Haraway, 2003), and the strengthening of social bonds through touch (Mondémé, 2021). For example, a firm handshake suggests honesty and competence and a weak handshake may suggest inability or dishonesty. Similarly, a touch on the arm can indicate various things depending on the type of touch. For example, grasping might indicate control over the other or fear; to brush someone’s arm can mean something entirely different.

The term “haptic sociality” (Cekaite & Kvist Holm, 2017; Goodwin, 2017) has been coined in studies of the role that touch plays in social relationships, where touch is considered as a vital part of communicative, embodied, social relationships. Historically, touch has played an essential role in power relations of social status, gender and age (Candlin, 2020; Classen, 2020a). In considerations of touch in human–technology relationships, Cranny-Francis (2011b) suggests that touch can constitute feelings of power for humans because, in human–technology relationships, the boundaries between humans, as well as between humans and technology, are challenged.

Connection can also be gestured through visually represented performance. For example, practices of touch are often used in the performance of gender. Erving Goffman (1979) studied gender in advertisements, dedicating a whole section of his book on the subject to observations of “the feminine touch”. Goffman considered how touch was significant to a social and culturally located performance of femininity. He observed how advertisements represented femininity by nonactive or non-utilitarian types of touching, such as cradling, caressing surfaces and just barely touching, and lacked any utilitarian type of touching such as grasping, manipulating or holding. Goffman claimed that images of the face, rather than hands, were more often used to convey touch in the case of the feminine body. Touching for the feminine body also often included self-touching that conveyed the feminine body as a delicate thing.

Connection and connectedness signified by Touch are valuable and positive in enabling us to relate to each other, to objects and to other beings, and to position ourselves reflexively in the world. However, touch can also be harmful when it occurs without full consent, rendering the producer or receiver of the touch without agency. As noted in Chap. 2, in their discussion of the agency of selfies, Theresa Senft and Nancy Baym (2015) have used the term “the grab” to refer to the way touch as a connection can both enable and constrain. Here selfies afford the selfie producer agency through connection and connectedness, but they can also be harmful or even disabling to the individual subject if the images are used in contexts beyond the depicted person’s original intent. The same can be applied to photographic memes when images are used beyond the depicted person’s wishes.

The complexity of connection can be explored in more detail through the remaining four fundamentals.

Engagement

Based on the etymology of the word “engagement” in the notion of to pledge or bind together, the fundamental of engagement recognises touch as “being with”. This can include contact that is physical, emotional (feeling or empathising) or intellectual (understanding or knowing). A term of engagement traditionally precedes marriage, recognising this period as a kind of “being with” in the notion of the term. Similarly, if we say “I have a prior engagement”, we indicate that we have committed to “being with” others.

Engagement as touch can be more intimate than simply connection because it places the toucher in intimate relationship with the touched, an acceptance of “being with” that creates an empathetic relationship between the two. The active acceptance of engagement means that it is usually intentional and more invested, whereas connections of touch can be unintentional and more casual.

In digital cultures, people experience not only connection but the engagement of “being with” through shared affective affiliations and investment, referred to by Christine Bacareza Balance as “emotional hooks” (Bacareza Balance, 2012, p. 139). Bacareza Balance argues that things spread and become viral because the emotional hooks they project are “key signifiers that catch the attention and sensibility of an audience” (Bacareza Balance, 2012, p. 139).

In the case of photographic memes and selfies, the way people use photography—described by (Shifman, 2013) as prospective photography—gestures to participants to offer creative contributions. Prospective photography hooks people into engagement with the conversation as a part of what Shifman (2013) calls hyper-signification. As we saw in Chap. 2, memes are essentially a group, so these “emotional hooks” of engagement are an essential aspect of memes. Because selfies are not defined in groups, they work a bit differently. Nonetheless, this emotional hooking still works as a part of the engagement in the conversation, for example, in responses specific to the platform where the selfie is shared.

The ways we engage through memes can be explored through the memetic fundamentals (Milner, 2012, 2018) of reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, spread and multimodality (see Chap. 2). Appropriating something is engaging with the original and contributing a new take. Resonance describes how the engagement experienced through memes acts on many levels, including personal, interpersonal and loose general connections with others. Collectivism describes the collective whole of a group of memes but can also suggest the ways people engage in a collective topic or conversation. And how memes spread depends on connections and engagement in the production and sharing. The multimodality of memes as gestures, including combinations of visual, aural, verbal and kinaesthetic practice, can also be considered engagement.

However, the level of engagement can vary, from personal or interpersonal, to broader levels of social engagement. Engagement, unlike connection, is most often gestured as intentional in social contexts through the accompaniment of other (visual, verbal, aural or kinaesthetic) practices. For example, if we touch someone, we can gesture the intention by looking them in the eye or saying something, as opposed to being distracted by something else and not noticing we brushed past each other.

The memetic fundamentals (Milner, 2018) of reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, spread and multimodality make the gesture of touch intentional through the engaged act. The contrast of engagement as intentional with connection that is often experienced as incidental can also provide a way to think about levels of engagement and how engagement is linked to social spaces. For example, a connection can be experienced as a passing touch on a crowded train of strangers, but engagement is gestured through the intentional touch of someone with whom we share a prior connection. However, connections and engagement sometimes work a little differently in the context of digitally networked visual practices. For example, in the digital space, we might experience engagement with other people even though they are strangers. We might identify with comments or shared images and, therefore, might connect through gestures such as upvotes or likes, thereby experiencing engagement through shared identifications. Indeed proximity (physical and gestured) plays a vital role in the level of engagement. The nature of the type of engagement is always dependent on context.

Contiguity and Differentiation

Contiguity as a fundamental of Touch is signified through awareness of boundaries that separate us from others, from objects and from the world around us, and it is in this way that we are able to locate the specific of the other (Cranny-Francis, 2011b). Franziska Schroeder and Pedro Rebelo write about the importance of interface for the interaction of musicians and instruments, stating that “the performer only becomes acquainted with the ‘thing’ at hand by being able to test boundaries, negotiate subtitles and uncover threshold conditions” (Schroeder & Rebelo, 2007, p. 88). Here the testing of boundaries, negotiation of subtitles and uncovering of conditions are crucial to engagement. The same applies in the context of human–human relationships, where “awareness of boundaries between ourselves and others enables the rich, delicate, creative exploration of possible relationships between us” (Cranny-Francis, 2011b, p. 475).

Contiguity through Touch in memetic relationships includes the ways people play with boundaries of photographic construction to expose social and cultural ideals through practices of hyper-signification (Goldman & Papson, 1996; Shifman, 2014a). An example is reaction photoshops (as I described in Chap. 2), which usually consist of putting people or objects in different backgrounds or scenes, such as “disaster girl” (an image of a young child with a wicked look on her face that is superimposed onto various crisis backgrounds) (KnowYourMeme, 2021). The manipulation of the images in the memes plays with concepts of photographic evidence and truth, and the practice includes an awareness of the boundaries or limitations of photography as an evidential document. Through this play and shared knowledge, relationships are built.

The genre of stock character macros like “confession bear” and “Asian dad” play with overt stereotypes and cultural constructs. Jacqueline Vickery and Andrew Nelson (2013) have examined “confession bear” and the idea of confession as a private practice. They have explored the ways people experience this meme, which is recognised as having limitations and pushing boundaries by publicly (although anonymously) acknowledging what is typically kept private. Focused on the “Asian dad” meme, Zhao Ding (2015) argues that such memes complicate the construction of racial identities because they act at once as jokes and as representations of the social conflicts surrounding race. Stereotypes are a social construct, and one of the ways this meme works as a joke is by drawing awareness to the boundaries that stereotypes create.

An awareness of boundaries that separate us from others, objects and the world around us can also be identified by examining the spatial relationships of digital cultures. For example, Jason Farman’s (2015) work offers insights into social concepts of embodiment, identity and community in the digital age, highlighting that proximity and location are means through which certain bodies are privileged in digital cultures. Notions of “place” as a space of intimate identification (Hjorth & Hinton, 2019) also deal with Touch as contiguity because the identification of place includes ideas of boundary making in relationships of space. Social boundaries of public and private space continue to be culturally limited for certain bodies where social gestures are linked to public space (Senft, 2008) and gendered bodies in a history (Andreallo, 2017). The movement of boundaries and spaces has also been examined in concepts of “digital wayfaring” (Hjorth & Pink, 2014), which explains the way selfies act as kinaesthetic practices (Frosh, 2015) that define boundaries of bodies moving through digital social spaces.

The boundaries of selfies and memes can be considered in terms of the way they communicate across time and space, thus minimising boundaries of distance, and for the cultural significance of how boundaries are performed in selfies. For example, gestured handholding, experienced when the extended arm is included in some selfie frames, connects the viewer to the performer (Frosh, 2015). It is a physical representation of boundaries that separate us, but simultaneously gestures towards connection in the act of sharing. Boundaries are also apparent by the conditions that establish the interface between the subject and the viewer. This may be the materiality of the technological device, software such as filters, or the cultural assumptions of individual subjects and viewers. The cultural significance of how boundaries are performed in selfies is seen in the ways selfies have been identified as gendered (Albury, 2015) and performing to social ideals (Tiidenberg, 2018), and how memes work through cultural identifications (Gal et al., 2016).

Differentiation is where “touch signifies the difference between self and other beyond the boundary” (Cranny-Francis, 2011b, p. 475). Whereas contiguity is in the awareness of boundaries, differentiation considers beyond the boundaries. So, in the case of selfies, although the extended arm cut into the frame of a selfie presents an awareness of boundaries, the selfie also moves beyond the boundaries of time and space through the immediacy of its sharing.

Touch as differentiation both connects us to technology and to each other, and differentiates us from technology and each other. In this way, Touch specifies uniqueness from the other—the other body, or the other as cultures outside the one in which we perform—so that as humans, we enjoy an intimacy through connection with other and, at the same time, identify ourselves as unique. Touch has the potential to differentiate human from object, real from not real. This is also an essential aspect of authenticity (Hess, 2015), which is important to social media connection.

Differentiation also has the potential to exclude by defining what bodies are addressed and who forms a community (Farman, 2020), and how platforms are dominated by particular bodies (Massanari, 2013, 2015). Drawing on the concepts of social spaces and proxemics that Farman (2020) discusses, differentiation also has the potential for examining the complexity of agency in online practices such as selfies and memes (Senft, 2015; Senft & Baym, 2015) where it can potentially contribute to an ethics of photo sharing.

Positioning

The sense of touch includes access to tactile, proprioceptive and vestibular senses, enabling us to position ourselves in space and time. These internal touch sensors “enable us to position our bodies in space, even without visual stimuli, and to achieve equilibrium or balance” (Cranny-Francis, 2011b, p. 476). Furthermore “positioning is always meaningful, and it enacts social and cultural meanings that locate us in our world” (Cranny-Francis, 2011b, p. 476). One way of positioning works in the context of selfies and memes is through the positioning of the viewer—their knowledge of the cultural conversation in time and space is essential to locating the meaning.

In the context of networked social relationships, Touch signifies positioning in multiple ways, including physical and embodied practices that have emotional, intellectual and spiritual meaning. If addressed reflectively, this positioning can make us aware of our own social, cultural and ethical positioning because, physically, “touch creates an awareness of our location in time/space through embodied engagement with the world around us” (Cranny-Francis, 2011b, p. 476). The amount of space something takes up in relation to our body acts as a signifier of our relationship: if something is bigger than us, then that thing or body is signified as having greater power, authority and dominance. When certain bodies are treated as socially invisible or do not have representation, then this signifies that they do not enjoy power, authority or dominance, socially or culturally.

In the use of memes, groups of people identifying and actively participating (Gal et al., 2016; Shifman, 2014b) makes a topic of conversation fill space and, in this way, emphasises a powerful context. Another example of space–power relationships is the way selfies make bodies of women visible in public spaces (Burns, 2015). The dominant female figure is not traditionally accepted, as is evident in a social history of nineteenth-century Europe, where female bodies were limited to private space (Andreallo, 2017; Kessler, 2006). Selfies therefore disrupt traditional concepts of public space as a political arena where visibility for some groups of people is traditionally limited. Furthermore, experiences of selfies disrupt traditional ideas of time and space; for example, one can perform a selfie and share it with another person vast distances around the globe, linking a moment in time and space as experience.

Digital social networks and performance, however, are not utopias of visibility: bodies, visibility and ways of being continue to be in a type of struggle, despite the hopes of early research on participatory cultures. One example of such struggles of visibility is exposed by Burns’s (2015) examination of selfies and young women (which I will discuss in more detail in Chap. 4).

Touch Is an Essential Aspect of Digitally Networked Social Relationships

Close examination and mapping of Touch has the potential to reveal things about the society and cultures we live in and ourselves as embodied subjects. Depending on the type of touch, and the bodies, social positioning and spaces involved, Touch can include degrees of both intimacy and violence.

We can use the fundamentals of Touch to understand how social relationships of photographic practices such as selfies and memes act as the skin of culturally inscribed bodies.

In this chapter, I have recognised and located the fundamentals of Touch as embodied practices. The fundamentals of Touch have been derived from diverse literature on how touch functions most broadly in cultural practices and then linked to the work of scholars explicitly focusing on digital cultures. Close reflexive mapping of the fundamentals of Touch in the space of digitally networked socialities offers a means through which the complexities of the technological self can be examined. Furthermore, this map offers a means for considering an ethics of digitally networked social relationships beyond memes and selfies, and indeed beyond visual, including the ways social relationships both enable and constrain technological bodies and embodied practice.

The focus of this book is specifically on memes and selfies as visual social practices; however, the mapping in this chapter has been approached from general to more specific so that it may also be helpful for future examinations of Touch beyond visual socialities and, more broadly, for everyday networked social interactions. Furthermore, examining visual practices beyond traditional visual limitations aims to locate selfies and memes as multimodal practices of the embodied self that can extend beyond visual contexts of touch.

Although the map of Touch offered in this chapter presents a broad approach to networked, embodied practices of touch, the meaning of Touch is always specific and contextual. With this in mind, the next chapter moves towards a more profound mapping of selfies and memes specifically by considering the example of memes consisting of selfies known as PrettyGirlsUglyFaces.