Ways of Feeling: Exploring Remote Personal Touch Communication
309 Regent St
Marylebone, London W1B 2HT
UK
Ways of Feeling: Exploring Remote Personal Touch Communication – Carey Jewitt (Knowledge Lab, UCL)
How might touching at a distance transform our experiences of communication and communicative practices and norms? In this presentation, Carey Jewitt will argue that we are at a tipping point for digital communication: moving beyond “ways of seeing” to include “ways of feeling”.
Much as optical technologies transformed sight and the visual (e.g. from the telescope and microscope, the X-ray, photography, film, computer graphics, MRIs to Google Glass), the rapid expansion in digital touch technologies is set to reconfigure touch and the tactile in significant ways. With this comes a fundamental shift in forms and modes of communication in digitally co-located and remote interaction. With a speculative focus on personal remote touch communication, across a range of technological domains, Carey Jewitt will explore the potential of touch-based technologies to re-shape what can be touched, as well as when and how it can be touched, and how this may supplement, heighten, extend and reconfigure how people (and machines) communicate, re-frame existing touch practices and lead to new touch-based capacities and practices.
The centrality of touch to both human experience and communication underpins the need to understand the social consequences of how touch is digitally remediated.
About the speaker
Carey Jewitt is Professor of Learning and Technology and Director of UCL Knowledge Lab, University College London. Her research interests are the development of visual and multimodal research theory and methods, video-based research, and researching technology-mediated interaction. She has led a number of research projects on methodological innovation most recently MODE ‘Multimodal Methods for Researching Digital Data and Environments’ (ESRC, MODE.ioe.ac.uk) and MIDAS ‘Methodological Innovation in Digital Arts and Social Sciences’ (ESRC, MIDAS.ioe.ac.uk).
Carey is a founding Editor of the journal Visual Communication (Sage), and her recent publications include Introducing Multimodality (2016) with Bezemer and O’Halloran, The Sage Handbook of Researching Digital Technologies (2014) with Price and Brown, and The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis (second edition) (2014).
Leave a Comment