Keywords

Why Touch Matters

The way we touch and how we touch has meaning in everyday physical relationships, just as it does in embodied social relationships of selfies and memes, and more broadly for the technological self. A proliferation of terms seeking to describe social relationships of selfies and memes suggests that everyday meaning and meaning-making are vital. Furthermore, the terms describing how selfies and memes visually communicate are also often implicit descriptions of Touch.

Although Touch as a mode of communication has received some attention across faculties, there is yet to be a thorough and explicit exploration of Touch as culturally meaningful in the context of digitally networked cultures, including social media. This book has begun to address this gap, proposing the term “semeful sociabilities” to describe culturally meaningful Touch in networked social relationships of the technological self.

Touch matters because it is part of who we are as humans, and as we seek to further design our technological futures, it is instrumental that we understand the frictions, cracks and pathic exposures of human, as well as technological, limitations.

Key Takeaways

  1. 1.

    Selfies and memes are meaning-making and meaningful practices. As such, selfies and memes have been described as implicit practices of Touch through a range of coined terms, including kinaesthetic sociability (Frosh, 2015), cuts (Warfield, 2016), and, more explicitly, as the grab (Senft & Baym, 2015), skin (Senft, 2015) and multimodality (Milner, 2012, 2018).

  2. 2.

    More than just a physical practice or sensation, Touch is culturally significant and a form of everyday meaning-making. The multiple significance of Touch is concerned with social and cultural meanings that can be physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual or political (Classen, 2005; Classen, 2012, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c; Cranny-Francis, 2011a, 2011b, 2013; Jewitt, 2017; Schroeder & Rebelo, 2007).

  3. 3.

    Touch is an everyday practice that is culturally meaningful. For example, types of handshakes, such as firm or weak, have different meanings; even an absence of a handshake is significant in everyday cultural settings. Touch is also a form of power and control because, culturally, there are bodies that have the privilege to touch and others that do not, and bodies that are touched and others that should not be touched.

  4. 4.

    Locating Touch in the topic of selfies and memes recognises how these practices act to document, analyse, understand and modify relationships between bodies and the environments in which we live. Locating Touch in this way identifies 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 when we touch and how these meanings are contextual to the nature of Touch and the circumstances in which it occurs.

  5. 5.

    The five fundamentals of Touch are connection, engagement, contiguity, differentiation and positioning (Cranny-Francis, 2011b). Practices of Touch in social media can be mapped by careful examination of these fundamentals. For instance, if Touch is understood as “two entities so close that no space remains”, then the fundamentals map the place of meeting through connection and engagement, the boundaries of the entities through contiguity and differentiation, and the context of the space, entities and event through the fundamental of positioning.

  6. 6.

    To understand Touch requires the careful examination of how Touch enables and constrains. For example, violence and intimacy are forms of Touch that both enable and constrain bodies and ways of being in social media. This has been explored in this book by using the fundamentals of Touch to map the example of the PrettyGirlsUglyFaces meme and the selfies that make up the meme.

  7. 7.

    The joke as a communicative tool is also a form of Touch. For example, humour has the potential to bring delight or release pent-up social tensions (Freud, 1976). However, something can also be passed off as a joke to dismiss antisocial behaviour (Jane, 2016). When used in this way, the joke acts as a form of symbolic violence (Lumsden & Morgan, 2018; Wacquant & Bourdieu, 1992) that silences the victim. The joke is different from what is simply comical because the joke transgresses social boundaries and potentially exposes an ugliness of the world (Freud, 1976).

  8. 8.

    The term “semeful sociabilities” describes how people connect and identify through everyday practices of Touch such as selfies and memes. Situating embodied subjects in cultures and social practices that are semeful (meaningful) or multiply significant (physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and politically) essentially locates the technological self as sensorily inscribed (Farman, 2020). As sensorily inscribed, embodiment includes more than just the physical, concerns navigation of spatial arrangements, is always cultural and understands technology as part of the self where action and interaction are culturally significant.

    Semeful sociabilities therefore:

    1. (a)

      Highlight how Touch and the semes (meanings) of Touch are understood as embodied practices, where the embodied technological self is in meaningful transaction and process in social relationships of Touch.

    2. (b)

      Recognise Touch as culturally significant and meaningful, providing a new dimension to understanding networked social relationships. Mapping the fundamentals of Touch provides a way to begin to understand how digitally networked social relationships can be considered as cultural Touch.

    3. (c)

      Recognise the complexity of social media relationships that include social and intimate connections, textures of those intimate connections that include “ugly feelings”, as well as antisocial practices of violence and disconnections. Because semeful sociabilities recognise the complexity of relationships, they can also be used to recognise how social media relationships both enable and constrain identification and ways of being.

  9. 9.

    To paraphrase Anne Cranny-Francis’s (Cranny-Francis, 2009, 2011a, 2011b, 2013) work on cultural Touch and to recontextualise it in the context of social media, semeful sociabilities essentially identify human socially networked relationships as embodied practices that are meaningful and meaning-making. As such, they are a part of the frictions, cracks and pathic exposures of human, as well as technological, limitations. Thus, examining the social relationships of Touch provides a way to better understand ourselves as humans.

Future Research and Limitations

Semeful sociabilities can be used in future research to map and understand a variety of selfies and memes. In this way, it will locate a type of discourse of Touch. However, future examinations of this type must recognise the ways that Touch both enables and constrains and focus on careful consideration of positioning to be valid. This includes the ways bodies are enabled and constrained in social relationships of Touch beyond forms of violence and intimacy and recognising textures of intimacy as more than simply positive connections.

Semeful sociabilities also have the capacity to guide further, urgently required, research into the extent of the textures of digitally networked intimacy (that include ugly intimacies such as loss and heartbreak) (Prøitz et al., 2017). They also have the potential to investigate technology-facilitated violence as embodied experiences. Currently, such violence is often dismissed in social structures as separate and not as serious as physical or “offline” violence (Dunn, 2021). Semeful sociabilities also provide a way to explicitly recognise experiences of violence as embodied and how they impact people’s lives as practices of Touch. Furthermore, semeful sociabilities expose how cultural ideals support violence and other forms of Touch in power relationships, thus providing a starting point for conversations and mapping of Touch as an ethics. This mapping of ethical relationships of Touch or ethics of semeful sociabilities can also draw on what Paul Frosh has called an “ethics of kinesthesis” (Frosh, 2018, p. 161).

Beyond selfies and memes, and indeed visual practices generally, semeful sociabilities can contribute to Algorithm Watch, an initiative that includes discussions and mappings of the automation of society. Algorithm Watch describes itself as “a non-profit research and advocacy organization … committed to watch, unpack and analyze automated decision-making (ADM) systems and their impact on society” (Algorithm Watch, 2021). In Australia, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) includes researchers working across social services, health, medicine and engineering. The work is as diverse as are the automated systems in our everyday lives. However, it also includes mapping and investigating automated systems that include apps, robotics, bots, programs and other technological systems that aim to streamline systems worldwide.

The concept of semeful sociabilities can be used in future research to help identify complex relationships of automated systems aspiring to seamless design. Further thought is required into the semes (meanings) of these automated systems as relationships of Touch. Research in seamless design has to date mainly focused on systems of surveillance and control. However, seamless design in a variety of forms in ubiquitous technology, including apps, robotics and systems currently used in health, medical, government and social services, requires further consideration. For example, seamless designs aim to make systems more streamlined, but focusing on the semes (meanings) of technological systems, designs and objects has the potential to recognise how seamless designs impact and Touch the people and organisations involved. Furthermore, semeful sociabilities has the capacity to identify where aspirations towards automation are culturally located in power relationships that both enable and constrain. In this context, semefulness then has the potential to recognise how particular seamless design systems act as practices of Touch and how these cultural and social systems are meaning-making and meaningful.

Because Touch is a key element in how we communicate in everyday relationships, and the self of the selfie and the me of memes are fundamental elements of everyday cultural communication, understanding Touch in digital contexts such as selfies and memes means understanding ourselves. This book has contributed ideas of how we can begin to consider Touch in networked social relationships. But, as is evident, there is considerably more work to be done in examining Touch in a broader variety of cultural contexts. Looking closely at Touch as meaningful exposes the social, cultural and political realities of everyday socialities.