Haptic media studies

Abstract

Editors' introduction: haptic media studies We are grateful for the opportunity to share with you eight exceptional pieces that, we hope, help lay the groundwork for Haptic Media Studies (HMS). As co-editors, each of us has made touch the centerpiece of our research programs, exploring its manifestation in media, technology, philosophy, culture, and history. Paterson's The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects, and Technologies (Berg, 2007) remains an influential work that serves as a cornerstone for touch-related studies across a wide range of fields, and other publications explore haptics in terms of technology, media, and methodologies (e.g. Paterson 2006, 2009). His more recent Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision, and Touch after Descartes (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), by exploring the conceptual and technological histories of sensory substitution, traces the complex entanglement of vision and touch in communicative practice. Parisi's publications on tactility, including his forthcoming Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and his work on the tactile aspects of videogame interfaces (e.g. Parisi, 2008, 2014), situate contemporary haptic human-computer interfaces in a macrohistorical framework, linking them back to prior technological constructions of touch in medical electricity, psychophysics, and cybernetics. Archer's work investigates cultural processes of tactile education around digital media, where users are asked to acclimate themselves to new habits of touching and navigating digital interfaces.

Material and sensory dimensions of everyday news use

“…In alignment with NRT, rather than focusing on cognition, in this article, we take as our point of departure people's embodied ways of knowing: knowledge they may not be able to produce off the top of their head but 'know' in their body (Merleau-Ponty, 1962;Moores, 2015;Pink and Leder Mackley, 2013). Our research therefore also responds to recent calls for more attention to haptic dimensions of media use (Parisi et al, 2017) and the embodied ways of knowing involved (Richardson and Hjorth, 2017). We also draw from postphenomenology, which is similarly concerned with the relation between technological objects and users' experience of them (Ihde, 2008;Verbeek, 2005).…”

Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication

“…In addition, despite the interdisciplinary turn to the multimodal and the sensory, and the increased centrality of embodiment and materiality, touch has, with a few notable exceptions (Classen , 2012Finnegan 2014), been neglected by both multimodal and sensory scholars. Cultural and media studies has brought touch into focus through touch metaphors and haptic visuality (Marks 2002; Cranny-Francis 2011), although the newly emergent Haptic Media Studies provides a historical and philosophical grounding for the study of touch as it is digitally mediated (Parisi et al 2017). Despite these new developments, however, touch communication is not well understood at a crucial moment when its extension into the digital realm raises new questions for social interaction and development.…”

Introduction: Digital Touch Communication

“…In addition, despite the interdisciplinary turn to the multimodal and the sensory, and the increased centrality of embodiment and materiality, touch has, with a few notable exceptions (Classen 2005(Classen , 2012Finnegan 2014), been neglected by both multimodal and sensory scholars. Cultural and media studies has brought touch into focus through touch metaphors and haptic visuality (Marks 2002; Cranny-Francis 2011), although the newly emergent Haptic Media Studies provides a historical and philosophical grounding for the study of touch as it is digitally mediated (Parisi et al 2017). Despite these new developments, however, touch communication is not well understood at a crucial moment when its extension into the digital realm raises new questions for social interaction and development.…”