Touch in digitalized worlds: An introduction

The English word digital (from the Latin, digitus) etymologically connects both fingers and technologies. In this special issue, we honor this dual meaning of the digital by foregrounding how living in a digital era both challenges and actualizes our senses, particularly our sense of touch. Ethnogra...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Broch, Tuva Beyer 1979- (Author) ; Varma, Saiba (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
Check availability: HBZ Gateway
Interlibrary Loan:Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany)
Published: 2024
In: Anthropology of consciousness
Year: 2024, Volume: 35, Issue: 2, Pages: 136-149
Further subjects:B Hands
B digital environments
B sensory ethnography
B Touch
B Embodiment
Online Access: Volltext (kostenfrei)
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Description
Summary:The English word digital (from the Latin, digitus) etymologically connects both fingers and technologies. In this special issue, we honor this dual meaning of the digital by foregrounding how living in a digital era both challenges and actualizes our senses, particularly our sense of touch. Ethnographically, the articles gathered offer intimate accounts of tactile experiences that intertwine with the digital in both direct and indirect ways. Despite ongoing—and often legitimate—anxieties about the disappearance of touch from our increasingly digitized world, our special issue shows that human engagements with digital technologies are more complex. We theorize touch through a phenomenological and relational lens and as a sensory experience that is deeply shaped and reconfigured by local, sociotechnical and political-economic concerns. This special issue illuminates how attention to hands, fingers, or touch can help us understand the relationship between bodies, ethical life, social relations, selves, and subjectivities through a new lens.
ISSN:1556-3537
Contains:Enthalten in: Anthropology of consciousness
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1111/anoc.12239