Michele White - Touch Screen Theory: Digital Devices and Feelings

Touch Screen Theory

Digital Devices and Feelings

Michele White

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This work is subject to a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Subject to such license, all rights are reserved.

The MIT Press would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers who provided comments on drafts of this book. The generous work of academic experts is essential for establishing the authority and quality of our publications. We acknowledge with gratitude the contributions of these otherwise uncredited readers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: White, Michele, 1962 author.

Title: Touch screen theory : digital devices and feelings / Michele White.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: Touchscreens are key elements of peoples everyday lives but critical frameworks for addressing these devices and the associated promises of engagement and embodied experiences are still wanting. White proposes methods for studying touchscreens and digital engagements and expanding a variety of research areas, including studies of digital and Internet cultures, hardware, interfaces, media and screens, and popular cultureProvided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022000783 (print) | LCCN 2022000784 (ebook) | ISBN 9780262544689 | ISBN 9780262372305 (epub) | ISBN 9780262372312 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Human-computer interactionSocial aspects. | Touch screens.

Classification: LCC QA76.9.H85 W458 2022 (print) | LCC QA76.9.H85 (ebook) | DDC 004.01/9dc23/eng/20220520

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000783

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000784

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List of Figures

Conrad Bakker, Untitled Project: Smartphone [Cracked Screen] [#2].

Screenshot from the Apple Pencil advertisement.

Screenshot from The iPhone fingernail problem, with Erica Watson-Curries photograph.

Screenshot from texasstar1981, freakin hair on camera lens - iPhone X.

Screenshot from Etsy Email Sign Up.

Screenshot from About Etsy.

Screenshot from Every time its acceptable to use the new Facebook reactions.

Screenshot from Sees Nails, ASMR Tapping On My Phone With My Long NATURAL Nails.

Screenshot from Tap Asmr, Play games with me (nail tapping) | ASMR.

Screenshot from Jackson Gibbs, Try not to touch your face. Also, try not to think about touching your face.

In a seminar discussion about the touchscreen, I countered the popular image of the screen surface as clean and dry. I narrated my experiences producing and using slick-with-sweat surfaces. I also noted changes in speed and movement, which occurred when my fingers came upon and were slowed down by embodied traces that were stuck on the screen. More recently, I found myself sweaty and sickened from excessive heat in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida and the total failure of the electrical grid. Challenged by a series of deadlines that a different organization, which shall remain unnamed, would or could not relax, I physically and mentally labored while crouched over my laptop and iPhone. This is a familiar and culturally shared telework position that requires further interrogation.

The associated devices were also lubricants and impediments. They were slippery because of the ways they paired and unpaired as I attempted to send files and find methods of accessing local hurricane news without using up what had become a precious resourcebattery power. My body and the devices had different demands. I could use a renewable, solar-powered battery backup to run a fan and thus moderate my intense sense of embodied heaviness and dissipation. However, it was slow to recharge, even when labored over by my partner in the hot sun. The other option was to privilege the devices requirements and thereby finish my work. Everything was wetmy body, the surface of the iPhone, and the touchpad and laptop case where it met my wrists and knees. My partner concernedly pointed out that perhaps the laptop was making me too warm. However, I couldnt sense the device because other feelings, including exhaustion and rage, predominated. I experienced an increased awareness of texture, including the abraded leather case of my phone, which was gouged with marks where my short nails had reached out and grabbed it. In such instances, my nails and the devices functioned as extensions and as reminders of the structured and sometimes misaligned conjunctions of physically touching and emotionally feeling.

Confronted with these and other experiences with stickiness, including the ways people are supposed to be connected to digital screens and desire them, I increasingly considered the limits of devices and my link to them. Companies and designers reference ties between individuals and devices as methods of eliding hierarchizing technologies in favor of visions of magical associations and pleasant feelings. Thus, Tim Cooks 2021 announcement about new devices, in a similar manner to Apples narratives about previous products, insists upon an experience where people love iPhone. Such texts, as this book will indicate, also convey less agreeable digital relations and often dictate identity scripts that specify who is acknowledged and enabled to engage.

Some of these texts, in a different manner than sweltering against devices, allow me to think about digital objects. For instance, Conrad Bakkers Untitled Project: Smartphone [Cracked Screen] [#2] and the associated painted sculptures of damaged smartphones with affected screens depict instances where technological connectivity and personal intimacy have been broken ( These screens are indeed affective, with their renderings of cracks and striated patterns. Such things, as my study of peoples narratives about damaged phones indicates later in this book, are deeply felt. The felt phone, even when portrayed by Bakkers art and situated in his hand, reminds viewers of the produced aspects of digital devices rather than their insistence on being transparent intermediaries that intermingle with bodies and become a form of skin. In one of Bakkers sculptures, the devices promise of emergency contact, which is blurred on the painted surface, is replaced by the emergency of the cracked and malfunctioning screen. Bakkers phones shift between notions of the digital window and representation and thereby question how these devices uncritically function as a primary interface for engaging the world. Therefore, his work, like my sweaty and unpaired devices and some of the other texts that I consider later in this book, enable people to think with technological objects and to consider who is acknowledged and how the associated relationships are framed.

Conrad Bakker, Untitled Project: Smartphone [Cracked Screen] [#2].

People as well as digital texts have been key to my studies. Some of the ideas about touchscreens outlined in this book, including my initial ideas about wet and slippery screens, were developed in conjunction with the attendees of the Touch Screen Mediations: Intersectional Feminist Theories of Digital Devices, Bodies, and Applications seminar, which I organized for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Annual Conference in 20172018. A very preliminary version of my research on heart buttons and narratives, which is expanded and advanced in chapter 3, was presented at the SCMS Conference in 2016. I appreciate Jason Farman, Hollis Griffin, and Sarah Murray for including me in the associated Mediating Mood: Experiencing the Interfaces of Social Media panel.