Smartphone touch operates without sensuality, as digital relays rather than felt contact

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. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1768

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes ch78 and ch92 on digital compulsion and touchscreen-mediated affect; also ch105 on fragmented cyberspatial attention. — connects to: The smartphone operates as devotional object of digital servitude — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 41; The phone is a sensory-deprivation chamber compared with the embodied world; Screen-based interaction retains the emotional exposure of bodily copresence. — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures: The Virtual…, 103 (+2 more)
• BMF: The Simpsons sight gag comparing the iPhone to the 2001 monolith, and Fisher’s image of humans as baffled apes before the screen, indirectly evokes the ape sequences with the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Broader Connections

• Screen-based interaction retains the emotional exposure of bodily copresence. #contradicts (0.85) — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures, 103
• The phone is a sensory-deprivation chamber compared with the embodied world #corroborates (0.80)
• Tele-technologies dismantle the body’s unified synthesis of action, perception, perceptibility, and vulnerability #expands (0.75) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 953