Smartphone touch is tactile input stripped of all sensory feedback

Evidence

Smartphones with touchscreen technology seem to secure the age of tactility. Yet, with smartphones, shouldn’t we rather talk of a touching without tactility? For the smartphone is certainly operated by touch, but it is a touch devoid of any sensuality. When the fingers encounter the glassy surface of the iPhone, everything they touch on the screen feels the same. The fingers are effectively acting as extensions of the eye and the brain — an eye and a brain that have now been radically re-habituated by cyberspace. The fingers become relays in a digital compulsion system, a set of digital triggers. Yet they are inefficient digital triggers, monkey digits that are too fat and lacking in suppleness to properly operate the touchscreen interface. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1768

Categorization

• BMF: The touchscreen monolith reference is explicit — Fisher himself links the iPhone to the monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose ‘primitive baffled users’ is the exact scene evoked. Genuine cross-domain jump since the 2001 connection operates as critical allegory, not same-subject overlap.
• XREF: connects to: Smartphone touch operates without sensuality, as digital relays rather than felt contact — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1768; The phone is a sensory-deprivation chamber compared with the embodied world

Broader Connections

• Smartphone touch operates without sensuality, as digital relays rather than felt contact #corroborates (0.90) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1768
• The phone is a sensory-deprivation chamber compared with the embodied world #expands (0.85)