Keywords

So far in this book, I have discussed everyday socially networked visual relationships as forms of implicit Touch, a definition of Touch and how its cultural significance is meaningful, and how Touch might be mapped in social networks where Touch both enables and constrains. Extending on these discussions, I will now focus on socially networked photographic relationships as embodied and sensorily inscribed practices of Touch.

In a context where Touch (with a capital T) is more than just physical, “semes” are the cultural meanings located in Touch practices. “Semefulness” is a term used initially by Anne Cranny-Francis (2011a, 2011b) to describe technological art–human relationships as meaningful. The term is an extension of the technology design concepts of seamlessness and seamfulness. Technology design generally aspires towards seam-less-ness where people experience immersions within technology. For example, in virtual reality gaming, the participant becomes immersed in the technological space, as opposed to sitting at a laptop where the body and technology are understood as separate physical entities. Debates in technology design also include arguments for seam-full-ness with an aspiration towards utilitarian empowerment where people can have more agency in their use of technology. The term “semefulness” (and the change in spelling of “seam” to “seme”) extends from this argument and identifies the discussion as referring to technological seams but focusing on their cultural significance. In this context, the semes are the meanings in the social relationships of Touch.

Extending on Cranny-Francis’s proposal of semefulness, which considered physical human–technology relationships as culturally significant Touch, I propose the term “semeful sociabilities” to describe networked social relationships as meaningful practices of cultural Touch.

In this chapter, I first define technological seams and seamlessness, and cultural semes and semefulness more fully. I then expand further on social media practices such as selfies and memes as embodied, with a short discussion of the technological self as sensorily inscribed. Drawing on the findings throughout this book, I use semeful sociabilities to describe visual social relationships of memes and selfies. Furthermore, I argue that semeful sociabilities are not limited to visual social relationships but could be extended in future research beyond visual contexts.

What Are Technological Seams and Semefulness?

Technological Seams and Seamlessness

Seams are the joints and places where things meet and are bound. In the case of your clothing, it is because of the seams that a garment presents as a whole rather than pieces of fabric. In the simplest terms, seams are essentially the places where two entities or objects meet. You may recall from earlier in this book that this is also the simplest definition of Touch. Seams then are essentially about Touch, and technological seams deal with technological aspects of Touch. Discussions of technological seams originated in technology design and include both physical and cultural considerations of human–technology relationships. In this book, I have focused on Touch as culturally meaningful and significant. The concepts of technological seams are helpful because they include how they act as forms of power and control, both enabling and constraining bodies.

In technological design, an aspiration towards seamlessness aims to make the technological experience for humans blend seamlessly into our everyday lives. Essentially, this aspiration aims towards experiences where people are no longer aware of the technology, the interface or the differences between human–technology and human–human interaction. Returning to the metaphor of seams in clothing, we can say that we aspire to seamless aesthetics by stitching the seams closely, pressing them flat and making sure they are hidden on the inside so that we wear a garment rather than pieces of fabric. When designers and engineers talk about technological seamlessness, they are often referring to ease of use and convenience. For example, in interface design, an aspiration towards seamlessness ensures the experience for the user flows and is not stressful or irritating. Most of us would have had experiences of poor interface designs or apps in workplaces that make things more complicated and irritating, and have longed for more seamless interfaces. Technological seamlessness can also include less visible screens in new technologies, or virtual reality technologies with a seamless technological design. The aim is to immerse the user experience such that the visual interaction might be described as inside the screen rather than a body interacting with a digital console or object as separate entities. Similarly, seamlessness in humanoid robotic design aims to make humanoids indistinguishable from a human body.

Seamless design might at first sound aspirational, but scholars have also argued in opposition to seamless design, claiming that seamless technology can also act as social control (Coleman, 2012; Graham & Wood, 2003; Haggerty & Ericson, 2000; Hughes, 1986; Lianos, 2003; Parag & Butbul, 2018), reducing agency and deferring human responsibility. This includes not only types of surveillance but also seamless technology systems. For example, the automated decision-making of government systems that aims to make things streamlined and seamless has had severe consequences worldwide, including injustice, discrimination and deaths (Chiusi et al., 2020). Other examples include the design of anthropomorphic social robots that have exposed and reaffirmed limited representations of gender and race (Andreallo & Chesher, 2019; Chesher & Andreallo, 2021a, 2021b; Howard & Kennedy, 2020; Strengers & Kennedy, 2020). The controversy of humanoid robots that are indistinguishable from living human bodies has also presented social fears, primarily based on automated technology. The remake of the 1973 film Westworld to a 2016 HBO series by the same name (Nolan & Joy, 2016–present) remains popular because it presents many of the current fears and ethical problems with an aspired-to future, anthropomorphic, robotic utopia. These examples suggest that aspiring to seamless design does not improve technology for humans, but rather replicates, and often makes more extreme, negative social and cultural issues.

Focused on utilitarian power and control for the user, seamfulness enables users to adapt to local conditions (Barkhuus & Polichar, 2011; Wenneling, 2007) and gain greater agency over the “black box” of algorithms (Sahoo, 2020). Scholars asserting towards seamfulness aim towards more transparent processes in human–technology relationships. Arguments for seamfulness aim to make the seams in user–technology relationships more visible. The arguments of seamfulness become complicated when following the historical discussions since the 1990s because the way we use technology today and how technology has developed differ from many early concepts. For example, Mark Weiser’s influential works that argue towards “invisible” and “ubiquitous” or seamless computer design in fact argue towards agency for users (1991, 1994). Weiser’s work was written before the end of the 1990s, long before today’s far more automated communities. And long before the worldwide reports from the Algorithm Watch (Chiusi et al., 2020) mapped out the ways that seamlessness in technologically automated systems is failing people and reducing agency. This aspect of seams is something I endeavour to explore in my future research and beyond this book.

Discussions of seamfulness reach beyond physical aspects of Touch to also include social and cultural contexts. In contrast, concerns of seamlessness tend to focus mainly on haptics in the development of technical devices and the physical material creations and experiences of technology by engineers and designers. We might say then that while seamlessness aims towards invisibility of seams, driven by ease of integration and streamlining of technology in everyday interactions, seamfulness aims to make relationships visible.

Drawing on humanities research and directing discussions of technological seamfulness specifically to the culturally meaningful, Anne Cranny-Francis coined the term semefulness (Cranny-Francis, 2011b, 2013).

Cultural Technological Semes and Semefulness

The term “semes” locates technological seams as culturally meaningful and identifies discussions of technological seams as also including cultural significance.

Semefulness deals with mapping culturally significant aspects of Touch in human–technology relationships. As I mentioned at the beginning of this book, I have capitalised the word “Touch” throughout the book to highlight that we are talking here about Touch as socially and culturally significant, rather than simply the physical aspects of touch. Cranny-Francis developed the concept of semefulness in considering material object and physical body relationships of Touch beyond haptocentric concepts or grasping (Cranny-Francis, 2011b). These relationships of touch beyond physical have been identified as requiring urgent attention by scholars in the context of the digital self (Elo, 2012) and, specifically, in the topic of photographic memes and selfies (Senft, 2015).

To explore meanings (or semes) of Touch, Cranny-Francis bases her work in humanities research on the body, including feminist research on sex and gender, and post-structuralist and deconstructivist readings of the mind/body dichotomy of Western thinking. As well as this, she includes embodied perceptions of difference and practices of othering by referencing works on class, race, ethnicity and disability studies exploring “othering”. Describing an approach to semes, Cranny-Francis describes work on Touch as:

focusing on its accultured meanings, as they are constituted through our tactile interaction with other beings and objects in our world. These meanings are potentially activated when we touch, although the nature of the particular interaction determines which meanings are deployed and to what ends. By exploring those meanings, we are able to map the potentials that are available in every tactile encounter and how they might be mobilized to create the most effective and/or rich interaction. (Cranny-Francis, 2011b, p. 465)

More than simply physical contexts, discussions of semes are located in concepts of embodiment. Here the body is understood as a text (Grosz, 1990/2020) that is culturally inscribed through relationships of Touch. This makes sense in the contexts of the technological self, social media and photographic socialities, which are also embodied practices because we live in media rather than with it (Deuze, 2011). In discussions considering semefulness and the technological self, work considering the concept of the sensorily inscribed body (Farman, 2009, 2015, 2020), the networked self (Papacharissi, 2011; Quinn & Papacharissi, 2018; Rettberg, 2014), and digital technologies and the self (Cover, 2015; Elo, 2012; Rettberg, 2014) is instrumental.

The Embodied Technological Self as Semeful

Technological seams are mainly seamless because they are woven into our everyday experiences, but these seams become apparent when technology breaks. Mark Weiser’s writings on seams up to the 1990s began to talk about the mobility of technology (or computer technology beyond the desktop) where people would no longer be tethered to a desk (Weiser, 1991). In more recent research on mobile technologies, Jason Farman (2009, 2015, 2020), although not explicitly mentioning technological seams, describes exposed technological seams of embodied mobile media when he describes the loss of cellular signal and suddenly not being able to access the internet. He writes:

When something breaks, that’s when you notice it. This is especially true of technologies that weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life. (Farman, 2015, p. 108)

Before I continue, I want to highlight Farman’s metaphor of fabric that aptly connects to the description of seams earlier in this chapter. More importantly, the “fabric” Farman talks about is explicitly located in everyday life. This weaving into the fabric of life is indeed a form of technological seamlessness. Indeed, so seamless that we are unaware of the seams until they break. However, unlike the previous descriptions of material seams, Farman explicitly talks about the mobile self as embodied. Furthermore, although Farman talks about these experiences of seamlessness as embodied media, he aims to expose the seams as the places that technology and the body rub up against each other, such as when things break.

The places that technology and the body “rubs up” against each other is the way Rob Cover (2015, p. 127) has described seams in his discussion of embodiment and the digital self. Dedicating a chapter to seams, Cover’s (2015) book Digital Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self clearly outlines histories of the body, embodiment and the technological self. Moving past earlier Descartian concepts of the body as made of meat (body) and mind (thinking), Cover deals with the notion of the immersed technological self—inside the screen and outside the screen. Then to explain a seamless technological self, where the offline and online selves are often merged, blurred or overlapping, Cover uses the metaphor of water. He explains how the technological self might be like a body wet from humid weather that cannot distinguish different levels of wetness because it is always in a state of wetness from humidity. This wetness is used as a metaphor for a state of seamless experience for the technological self. As already noted, Farman has described this similarly seamless experience as only apparent when things break, exposing the seams.

The “networked self” is another earlier description of the technological self that specifically describes modalities of society and identity performance that develop across online and offline platforms (Quinn & Papacharissi, 2018). The networked self explicitly deals with ideas of offline and online, not as separate spaces, but the ways they blend, blur and merge. Furthermore, Kelly Quinn and Zizi Papacharissi (2018) note how these “performances of the self enable sociability, and for the performer, these socially oriented performances must carry meaning for multiple publics and audiences without sacrificing one’s true sense of self” (Quinn & Papacharissi, 2018, p. 354). These references to meaning and meaning-making in social relationships explicitly acknowledge the semes (or meaning) involved in practices of the technological self.

Essentially, discussions of embodiment deal with concepts of spaces and the body (Cover, 2015; Farman, 2009, 2012, 2015, 2020; Hjorth & Hinton, 2019; Hjorth & Pink, 2014; Marwick & Boyd, 2011; Quinn & Papacharissi, 2018), as well as concepts of boundaries (Ashforth et al., 2000; Nippert-Eng, 1995; Zerubavel, 1993). Farman’s work on mobile technology, which thoroughly considers the body in the movement of spaces and the body as a space of identification and performance, is essential to understanding social media. Farman draws on the work of Henri Lefebvre, who argues that “embodiment is always a spatial practice and conversely, space is always embodied” (Farman, 2012, p. 24). These ideas are supported by other scholars, such as Quinn and Papacharissi (2018), whose work on the networked self includes concepts of spaces of the self, and Covers (2015), whose work on digital identities considers semes and the technological self, dealing with spaces of technology and immersiveness. Discussions of context collapse (Marwick & Boyd, 2011) have also dealt with the ways various public and private spaces have evolved in online contexts. This has also led to discussions of “place” that define more intimate or personal connections in concepts of place in social media (Hjorth & Hinton, 2019).

Just as embodiment is about the relationship of space, Touch and seams are also about relationships of space. In Chaps. 3 and 4, I defined the fundamentals of Touch—connection, engagement, contiguity, differentiation and positioning—through concepts of spaces and merging entities. Connecting or engaging is a form of Touch involving movement of bodies and the spaces in which they interact and inhabit. Contiguity is essentially about boundaries and something that Farman explicitly mentions in the discussion of embodiment and connection. Differentiation is also about spaces and space-forming that can be defined through concepts of the other. Finally, positioning is our place in a space relative to other entities, bodies or things. Through movement and interactive spaces (that can be defined by the fundamentals of Touch), identity, identifications and performances of the self take place. These are never set forms or formations, but are unique to an individual and inconstant process.

Semeful Sociabilities and the Sensorily Inscribed Body

Embodied Touch and semes (meanings) can be understood as part of the sensorily inscribed body. Farman (2012, 2020) proposes the sensorily inscribed body by locating it in six essential elements of embodiment. These intertwined elements are also useful for locating semefulness in socially networked practices or “semeful sociabilities”.

The first essential element of embodiment is that it is always spatial. However, it is not always located in physical space, the second element. When we talk about Touch and technological semes, we are also talking about spatial relationships. However, these are not limited to physical space or material entities. The cultural meaning-making or significance is most often not physical, even though it is related to physical actions. In this way, it is never outside of culture, the third element. Farman also defines the sensorily inscribed body as never outside culture.

The fourth element of embodiment of the sensorily inscribed body notes that embodiment depends on the “cognitive unconscious” (Farman, 2012, p. 29), the element thus intending to identify how technology becomes an extension of the self. However, it also points towards the fifth element that identifies embodiment as conceived out of biological factors. In the case of semeful sociabilities, or culturally meaningful relationships of Touch, Touch is located as an extension of the self in embodied networked social practices such as selfies and memes.

The fourth and fifth elements locate how embodied practices, including those of Touch, can extend beyond the physical. It is also recognised that action and interaction are meaningful and culturally located. As explored in Chaps. 3 and 4, cultural types of physical touch have social meaning that can be understood beyond the physical interaction.

The sixth element of embodiment of the sensorily inscribed body identifies how “embodiment is always conceived in relationship to modes of inscription” (Farman, 2012, p. 30). This element shapes all the others because it identifies the body as the text (Grosz, 2018, 1990/2020), where Touch can be a form of inscribing the body and inscribing other bodies through culturally located interactions.

The sixth element is also vital to understanding socially networked practices such as selfies and memes as embodied identifications, recognising how they are never fixed but in constant interaction and movement. Recognising how the self is not limited to a particular performance or selfie, Jill Rettberg (2014) described the technological self as a type of “feed” to highlight it as part of the process. Furthermore, Paul Frosh’s proposal of kinaesthetic sociability (see Chap. 2) aims to explicitly describe selfies as a social practice in muscular movements and involving the body in assemblage (Frosh, 2015). The body as an assemblage is also explored through Larissa Hjorth and Sarah Pink’s term “digital wayfaring” (Hjorth & Pink, 2014), which describes the performance and trying on as part of an embodied interaction and inscription on the body as it passes through contexts, a process where the self is constantly in creation and assemblage. The assemblages, although never fixed, are significant or semeful.

The sensorily inscribed body, then, is not simply semeful but located in the movement and interaction of the technologically embodied self. It is a semeful sociability that recognises the networked body as in movement and unfixed, where the body is a type of continuous feed (Rettberg, 2014) or assemblage (Hjorth & Pink, 2014) in movement (Frosh, 2015), but involving culturally located semes (signs) communicated by the relationship, performance and interactions that constantly evolve.

From Visual Social Relationships to Semeful Sociabilities

Semeful sociabilities recognise the embodied technological self as in meaningful transaction and process in social relationships of Touch. At the same time, Touch as meaning considers embodied subjects as situated in cultures and social practices that are semeful or multiply significant, physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and politically. Essentially, this locates the technological self (Rettberg, 2014) as sensorily inscribed (Farman, 2020), where embodiment includes more than the physical, concerns navigation of spatial arrangements, is always cultural, and understands technology as an extension of the self where action and interaction are culturally significant.

The arguments presented throughout this book point towards networked social relationships as more than visual and offer a description of these relationships as semeful sociabilities. That is semeful sociabilities:

  1. 1.

    Include the ways people connect and identify through everyday practices of Touch such as selfies and memes. Selfies and memes are visual practices implicitly recognised in academic literature as practices of Touch (Chap. 2). As such, they have been identified as gestural (Frosh, 2015, 2018; Milner, 2018; Senft & Baym, 2015; Shifman, 2013, 2014a), embodied (Frosh, 2015; Milner, 2018; Senft, 2015; Shifman, 2012, 2013, 2014a, 2014b) and multimodal practices (Milner, 2012, 2018). The proliferation of terms to describe visual social relationships highlights the limitations of visual analysis as an isolated mode.

  2. 2.

    Recognise Touch as culturally significant and meaningful, providing a new dimension to understanding networked social relationships. The fundamentals of Touch—connection, engagement, contiguity, differentiation and positioning—are interwoven in how we practise and understand Touch. Mapping the fundamentals of Touch provides a way to begin to understand how digitally networked social relationships can be considered as cultural Touch (Chap. 3).

  3. 3.

    Recognise the complexity of social media relationships that include social and intimate connections (of varying textures) as well as antisocial practices of violence and disconnections, and can be used to recognise how social media relationships both enable and constrain identification and ways of being (Chap. 4).

Semeful sociabilities also have the potential to guide further, urgently required, research into the extent of the textures of digitally networked intimacy (including ugly intimacies such as loss and heartbreak) (Prøitz et al., 2017). Attention given to digitally networked intimacy has so far tended to mainly focus on specific types of intimate connections, neglecting the “textures” or “broken assemblages” such as affective witnessing of disasters and “ugly feelings” of relationship break-ups. Semeful sociabilities can contribute to a closer and broader examination of intimate connections that include such textures because the fundamentals of Touch provide a means through which the complications and details of touch can be considered.

Furthermore, semeful sociabilities also have the potential for investigating technology-facilitated violence as embodied experiences, and the ways cultural structures support violence and other forms of Touch in relationships of power.

Essentially, semeful sociabilities identify human socially networked relationships as embodied practices that are meaningful and meaning-making, and, as such, a part of the frictions, cracks and pathic exposures of human, as well as technological, limitations. Thus, by examining the social relationships of Touch we can understand ourselves better as humans and identify how understanding social media and technology means close examinations of how culturally situated relationships both enable and constrain bodies. More than this, identifying Touch and social media as embodied identifies it as situated in a biopolitics of touch (Cranny-Francis, 2013), and identifying relationships of Touch in this way is a potential means to empower bodies that remain limited and constrained, as well as to identify injustices in power relationships that presently remain rather vague, unattended to or dismissed altogether in considerations of technology design and use.

Beyond the scope of this book, future research is required, in direct consultation with participants and considering more diverse examples, to understand our semeful sociabilities or meaningful social relationships of Touch. Future research will also move beyond the context of social media to also understand automated decision-making processes as relationships of Touch.