MOBILE MEDIA: Changing Touch Practices
Price, Sara, Jewitt, Carey · UCL Discovery (University College London) · 2025
This chapter explores what touch means for digital communication. It presents two case studies on how digital touch technologies reconfigure touch experiences and practices. The first explores remote touch messaging through a tactile communication device. The second explores the reconfiguring of “knowing touch” and new spatiality practices through a wearable bio-sensing device. The chapter draws out and discusses three emergent themes on digital touch practices for mobile communication: the reconfiguring of the dynamics of touch, how the body is (or is not) brought into the touch communication space and how both a sense of connection and disconnection are made manifest.