Touching through distance: Cyborg affective touch during Covid-19 pandemic

Tactile deprivation

The enforcement of social distancing measures and lockdowns across the globe to control the spread of Covid-19 virus has decreased opportunities to touch each other, culminating in various forms of tactile deprivation (Askari et al., 2022). During the pandemic confinement, tactile interaction in social exchange occasions has been discouraged and became less accessible, especially for some groups of people (e.g. people living alone, elderly people, immunocompromised). Nonetheless, in the apical emergence of pandemic, the lack of contact and bodily interactions – quite problematically labelled as ‘social distance’ – has concerned people of every age and health condition with different intensities. In a contribution that sparked reflections around how these measures impact the grounding existential structures of human self (Carel et al., 2020), the authors recollect an anecdote which suggests how tactile deprivation has been disruptive, as well as how online interactions cannot fully replace the atmospheric presence of the other within in-person interactions: ‘One of our children, age 7 years, was asked if he wanted to talk to his friends online. “No!” he replied angrily, “what’s the point if I can’t touch them!?”’ (Carel et al., 2020: 87).

Physical distancing and isolation have enhanced the significance of touch as a vital sensory modality of human experience. The virus’ proliferation has pushed us to re-think the way tactile interactions factor into everyday life, leading to a re-emphasis of the importance of affective touch in public discourses and imaginaries. The New York Times headline ‘What All That Touch Deprivation Is Doing to Us’ ¹ and radio broadcasts such as BBC episode ‘Touch Hunger’ ² illustrate how the impossibility of touching one another has been one of the most keenly felt concerns during the lockdowns. Currently, there is also a strong focus on the negative consequences of Covid-19-provoked conditions of non-touching with respect to parameters such as wellbeing (Burleson et al., 2022), anxiety and loneliness (Von Mohr et al., 2021), and resurgence of health mental issues (Venkatesh and Edirappuli, 2020).

During the pandemic, a plethora of digital media were promptly assembled to help people carry on with their lives. This swift re-organization of public and private life offered itself as a surrogate scenario of lived experiences in mediascapes (Casetti, 2018). Online classes, fitness activities, drinks with friends, and visits to the doctor have been facilitated by the digital blending of shared spaces. Digital devices have been both applauded for maintaining people connected and shunned for failing to live up to the physical contact experiences. It became quite obvious through these worldwide substitution practices that audiovisual media ruled the day, and they were not effective when it comes to managing distant intimate relationships properly. The impossibility of touching the loved ones tentatively proved that haptic technology ought to gain central position when designing interactive systems. In particular, technological solutions stemming from the field of affective haptics have been incentivized from the pandemic. Affective haptics is indeed a research area that focuses on designing devices capable of influencing subjective emotional state through the sense of touch. Their operating principle consists in simulating the experience of touch through a digital device suggesting an affective experience to the subject. The label affective haptic devices (AHDs) has been used (Askari et al., 2022) to address several of them such as devices simulating a hug (Teh et al., 2012) or handshake (Nakanishi et al., 2014), or like Bond Touch or Hey bracelets ³ that aim to communicate the affective state of a distant person through vibrations. Covid-19 thus sheds new light on haptic devices that are emerging with a promise of a more tangible sense of staying ‘in touch’. These technologies pledge to fill the haptic gap in digital communication, positioning their devices as an opportunity to keep touch involved over long distances. As one can read on the Hey bracelets website, when any relationship is being forced to hold at a distance, it can be helpful to mimic human touch by sending and receiving signals through the device, to show you care and think about each other. Hey bracelets thus function by producing a gentle squeeze on the owner’s wrist, meaning that the other one is digitally reaching out. Some reviews already available of the Bond Touch emphasize the potential of the device, along with some of its limitations:

It was fun getting a buzz randomly during work that let me know he was thinking about me, and it was easy to reach over and buzz him back to reply! We even came up with code buzzes that meant different things;

but we also read that:

The vibrations feel (and sound) exactly like a phone vibrating against your wrist, and it’s not always that pleasant. When I read the description of these bracelets, it said something to the effect of you would feel your partner’s touch exactly as they touch it. With technology as advanced as it is, I guess I was expecting it to mimic, in a way, an actual touching sensation vs a numbing vibration. ⁴

To analyse these devices is crucial because as Mark Paterson (2007) wrote, any efforts to reproduce and ‘imitate’ tactile sensation are actually productive, in that they heuristically reshape what it means to touch (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2009). This means that our tactile system is being modified by every new touch-related technology appearing in social contexts. The historicity of haptic perception has been extensively studied by David Parisi, who proposes an archeology of contemporary high-tech artefacts based on embodied touch practices within technoscientific heuristic methodologies. Moreover, haptic media instigate a shift in our comprehension of how tactile sensorialities actually work, communicate, and make sense. Haptic apparatuses transform tactile sensoriality into a productive and faceted site of meaning-making of bodily experience. They also force us to recognize and draw attention to the fact that our collective tactile sensorium has been cumulatively articulated and altered by haptic technologies. Far from being an immediate and purely biological sensory modality, we will support an appreciation of touch as socio-technically modulated and constantly reframed through its various mediations (Parisi et al., 2017).

Replacing social touch

The designers of haptic technologies pay a lot of attention to the nuanced and emotionally rich features of embodied touch. The goal of much research in this area seems to tend towards creating prosthetics and gadgets that are sufficiently comparable to human touch to be able to digitally replace its psychophysiological and embodied effect. For example, HaptiHug has been designed to realistically reproduce the human-hug gesture, generating tactile pressure simultaneously on the chest and the back, while HaptiButterfly imitates the ‘butterflies in your stomach’ feeling, – as if you are experiencing falling in love – through arrays of vibration mechanism attached to the abdomen (Tsetserukou et al., 2009). The idea behind the latter device is to evoke the emotion of joy derived from meeting the loved one rather than necessarily touch them – making clear affective haptic is not just a matter of interactive and skin-to-skin kind of touch. Haptic entrepreneurship is creating more and more complex whole-body systems that couple vibration, electricity, and force feedback to replicate the tactile materiality. The same replicative trend has been fancied during Covid-19 with the goal to simulate embodied and social touch, to restore wellbeing, and to help manage anxiety.

To expect total repair of social and affective touch through technological simulation is to tread a risky path. Although haptics’ potential has been recognized, it is not an effective shortcut to undo the effects of forced distancing. As David Parisi (2022) puts it, ‘[g]iven touch’s impossible complexity, any attempt to digitally remake it will be necessarily incomplete and fragmentary’. Moreover, rebuilding affective touch through protocols, patents, and normative models proposed by designers and developers often means to override sociocultural complexity and situatedness (Cooley, 2014). Within this replacing tendency, the plurality of human touches does not matter, rather it is subsumed under an idealistic and universal ergonomic touch. Recreating affective touch has meant focusing on mechanical details and cause-and-effect structures over subtle sociocultural dimensions.

Currently available digital touch technologies seem to underestimate specific skillfulness, (dis)ability, gender, and cultural habits in such multilayered phenomenon like affective touch (De Falco and Dolezal, 2023). Normativity and appropriateness of social touch not only follow cultural habits, touch itself can be subjectively felt as awkward, unwanted, or even abusive. The pandemic did not reduce some of these undesired, violent, and abusive forms of touch. Let us just consider George Floyd’s homicide or even the inversion of domestic violence levels (Roesch et al., 2020): These cases clearly show that some form of touch not only resist social isolation but even flourish in pandemic circumstances.

Taking into account the disruptive side of touch means also to acknowledge that, as such, touch is a sensory posture towards otherness – as it is sight or smell – that has many affective connotations. Another problematic parameter could be the generational factor of technological readiness, that is, the extent to which people embrace new technologies. It may be an important factor behind individual differences in people’s intention to use AHDs, determining levels of social acceptability towards them and thus modulating the desire to explore them. On the other hand, AHDs might offer a controllable and less intimate type of touch that may be appreciated by some touch-aversive or tactile-sensitive subjects (Askari et al., 2022). Nonetheless, to create standardized technologies that do not take differences such as these into account is to elaborate a normative frame of exclusion, casting people afar from using them or causing them unpleasant experiences. Pointing at including specific kinds of bodies, such as gendered, ageing, and racialized, is crucial when constituting new imaginaries and experiences bonded to the emergence of haptics technological innovation. We then advocate for a more sophisticated understanding of touch, one that cannot be rushed towards a one-size-fits-all technological solution.

Towards feminist understandings of extended touch

Developments in haptic technologies then suggest that new modes of tactile interaction could be available, that extend and partially challenge the ‘embodied touch’ as we know it. Within this scenario, Covid-19 has incentivized new technological-material schemas of touch, by raising further paths of investigations. The relevance of AHDs consist of not only the design choices of contemporary devices but also the new epistemic framework that this technology may mean for human (and non-human) interactions. AHDs could provide a richer scenario, proposing new forms of connection and attachment, involving changing boundaries between bodies in shareable touch-experiences. We propose that AHD usage demands a somatic adaptation, namely a whole re-organization of our bodily and perceptual experiences; for addressing this point, we believe that Pietro Montani’s influential analysis of two antithetical modalities to implement technological devices within our body may be applied to the case at stake. In discussing how technologies may complement or implement human experiences, Montani addresses AR Wearable Technologies (specifically Google Glasses), by highlighting that technological devices do not have in themselves deterministic ways to be used, but quite at the contrary, they are open to heterogeneous – and even contradictory – forms of interactions. If used in the first way, the device may (i) offer an optimization of ‘some operations that users delegate to the devices themselves, then selecting the inputs from the outside world’ (Montani, 2014: 88); if it is instead used according to the second approach (ii), it becomes a ‘true prosthesis of an embodied gaze, a screen at once opaque and transparent’ (Montani, 2014: 88). In a similar fashion, AHDs may either be understood as devices that simply adds something to the perceptual experience (and namely the touch of someone who is not physically ‘present’ during the act), or they may be seen as powerful ways to re-organize our perceptual and existential being in the world (by re-signifying what touch is). We frame our perspective within the broader assumption that every human-technology relation determines specific ways of knowing and sense-making of our lived experiences, by recognizing that technologies are meaning-making apparatuses. These devices have become powerful trajectories of touch at a distance and expanded the conditions of possibility of touching and being touched (Barad, 2012: 219). They have reconfigured our mundane practices by offering alternative modes of experiencing proximity while staying at a physical distance. However, it is not year clear to what extent this kind of technology may impact our self-comprehension as human subjects, neither our material life conditions. Saying it plainly, we cannot take it for granted that mediated forms of touch may impact equally all human beings. The first risk endangered by these technologies lies on the notion itself of technology, when one fails to recognize the material dimensions and the intersections of sex, class, gender, and race not only in using these technologies but also in designing them.

Techno-touch points to the direction of quasi-physically connecting individuals who are spatially distant, then increasing chances to ‘being-in-touch’ with other in a manner that overcomes the risks of disembodiment that other forms of digital technologies may encounter (e.g. online interactions). By bringing back tactile sensations, these devices build up creative ways to interact with others that challenge the primacy of visual interactions, then (i) offering alternative ways of in-distance socialization (e.g. for people with visual impairments), (ii) complementing visual-centric relationships, and (iii) discussing the notion of intimacy and proximity. Although, in this short contribution, we cannot extensively discuss these elements, we now sketch some notes on the triad intimacy-technology-self. ADHs challenge the idea that intimacy may happen only in proximity and communion with otherness: This technology works heuristically as it does with the pregnant experience in the study, where she states that ‘closeness or proximity is constituted through rather than against such otherness and distance’ (p. 26; our accent). The potential to touch and be touched ‘at distance’ ought not to be read as a substitutive (and loss-making) manner of the embodied touch, but rather as a creative and unique way of being ‘in touch’ according to new rules and norms of interactions. Under this perspective, technological-mediated touch is a contemporary declension of the figuration of cyborg, as ‘condensed image of both imagination and material reality’ (Haraway, 1991: 150). Techno-affective touch then participates to cyborg regime (e.g. in visualization practices, Prasad, 2005), in that it is a form of hybridization of the machine and the flesh. Techno-touch is properly a challenge of the dichotomy human/machine and fits in for all intents and purposes into cyborghood:

The system of ideological oppositions between signifiers of touch and vision remains stubbornly essential to political and scientific debate in modern Western culture. This system is a field of meanings that elaborates the ideological tension between body and machine, nature and culture, female and male, tropical and northern, colored and white, traditional and modern, and lived experience and dominating objectification.

What if this ‘ironic appropriation’ (Haraway, 2003: 4) of androcentric technological narratives and practices help us to re-think ourselves as cyborgs, namely agents and participants to hybrid forms of existence? And what do these technologies suggest us concerning Western idealization of the human self as a subject contained by their own skin, separated from others, and acting through their mental faculties? All in all, AHDs are anything but a further technology that suggests us that conceptions of human beings as visual-centric and ‘natural’ subjects are, if not wrong, at least simplistic and overall unsatisfactory.