Digital touch for remote personal communication: An emergent sociotechnical imaginary

Workshop participants

Workshop participants were postgraduate students (studying Media and Communication, Design, Computer Science and Linguistics) from four leading UK universities. While participants can be situated – to different degrees, as apprentice professionals in the ongoing hegemonic production of future digital communication, none had specialist knowledge or experience of haptics or digital touch. Our rationale for selecting these participants was to capture a range of disciplines and experiences in relation to the sociotechnical imaginaries of digital touch, not to attend to their individual imaginations or designs of digital touch as a lens through which to construct future sociotechnical imaginaries. Participants were recruited via the project Twitter and research networks. Attendance was voluntary and a total of 31 people participated in the workshops (age range 22–51 years, of whom 25 were female, and 6 male). Participants were selected to ensure a range of disciplinary perspectives on the digital and communication.

The workshop participants worked in small groups (three to four people), giving a total of nine groups. The groups were organized by the researchers to ensure an interdisciplinary mix in each group (each included at least one participant with a background in HCI or Computer Science, in Design, and in Communication or Linguistics). Participants stayed in one group throughout the workshop. The groups were initially numbered and later took the group’s prototype name.

Workshop activities

Following introductions to the project and participants, three activities were facilitated. These were designed to generate talk, hands-on interaction and future-facing exploration to support participants to think through touch technology with an emphasis on social and sensorial experiences, including their experiences of remote personal communication, their practices, cultural-social narratives and imaginations of touch across communication and technology in the context of personal relationships. The activities were as follows:

Materials and data

The activity of the workshop groups was video recorded using a mix of fixed cameras to record the interaction of participants in each small group (seated at tables), and hand-held cameras to capture participant interactions with the materials (away from the table). We moved and ‘felt’ with participants to gain insights into their sensorial experiences. The video data were supplemented with written research observations, notes made by the groups and flip chart notes, photographs and audio recordings. A total of 31 hours of video data was collected, consisting of between 7 and 14 hours of data per workshop (depending on the number of small groups in a workshop). Video recordings provided us with a record of the activities to be analysed in retrospect, and a sensory–experiential and reflective tool for the generation of data (Jewitt and Leder Mackley, 2018).

The collaborative experience of prototyping and interacting with prototypes created a context that promoted awareness and criticality of touch. It provided touch experiences and explorations that enabled participants to externalize and materialize their ideas – to literally put them on their body and feel them. This provoked and supported the participants to explore their experiences, memories and imaginations of touch, their touch practices and skills, and engagement with the features and character of touch as a communicative form. The groups worked collaboratively, and disciplinary differences between participants generated considerable discussion, occasionally differences regarding terminology (e.g. output and input, system) and approaches led to productive conversations, argument and debate. Nonetheless, the participants expressed a shared sociotechnical imaginary of digital touch, their desires and fears coalesced through shared discourses of digital touch communication (e.g. on appropriate and inappropriate touch).

Group participants collaboratively agreed on the focus of their digital touch prototype and use scenario based on their brainstorming session and experiences of remote personal communication. A set of 10 prototypes produced by the groups were photographed and collected. These are described in Figure 1.

Participants collected the materials as a group, trying out the feel of the materials on their own and one another’s bodies. They touched and hugged themselves and group members – making and thinking through the body (Jewitt et al., 2020b). Initially, participants with backgrounds in design and HCI were more confident in prototyping, however, all actively engaged in the process. The vignettes and examples presented in the ‘Findings’ section provide a detailed snapshot of how members of the groups interacted, and give a sense of the discursive environment of the workshops, and participant engagement with the activities. A full account of the group interactions, and related discursive issues (e.g. in relation to gender and technology) are discussed elsewhere (Jewitt et al., 2020b).

Analytical framework and procedure

The critical analytical framework we used to study digital touch communication employs the sociotechnical imaginary (outlined earlier) alongside the design-based method of rapid prototyping, and a multimodal and multi-sensorial approach. This novel combined approach descriptively grounds participants’ emergent desires and preoccupations within speculative futures of digital touch.

The ‘sociotechnical imaginary’ provides the conceptual framing for our analysis of digital touch within the context of remote personal communication. In taking this approach, we seek to ‘illuminate the role of imagination in the fabrication of social lives’ (Appadurai, 1990) with respect to touch communication. Bringing the sociotechnical imaginary into contact with communication studies enables us to examine past, present and future developments that may impact on the media landscape and engage with communication in futures research (Bouwman and Van Der Duin, 2007). Within this frame, we use the design-based method of rapid prototyping as it is attuned to researching ‘emerging and uncertain worlds’ (Salazar et al., 2017), including the digital (Lupton, 2018), and draws the body explicitly into ways of knowing, exploring and thinking (Jewitt et al., in press).

Our analytical approach combines multimodality (Jewitt et al., 2016) and sensory ethnography (Pink, 2015) – two inductive data-driven approaches that place interaction and/or re-enactments at their centre and make significant use of video-recorded materials (Jewitt and Leder Mackley, 2018). A fine-grained account of participants’ multimodal and multi-sensorial interactions and experiences is achieved through immersion in and iterative engagement and reflection with the video. This consists of multiple viewing of the video recordings and supplemental materials (both team and individual) to describe interactions between participants, materials and the prototypes with attention to a range of bodily modes – position, posture, gesture, gaze and movement alongside speech. Alongside viewing the video as a record of events, we reflected on our embodied researcher experiences of the workshops and materials, occasionally re-enacting participants’ interactions, and handling the prototypes as artefacts with attention to their sensorial and social properties. Attention was paid to significant multimodal discourses, practices and norms related to remote digital touch communication, within and across the groups. We honed in on aspects of digital touch that participants’ interactions privileged, valued and ignored. This included identifying repeated and shared actions, revelatory moments and how events unfolded over time. We traced the connections through their discourse (bodily as well as linguistic) across their past, present and future visions of remote digital touch communication, to explore the influences of these different planes of time on one another.

Through this inductive process of analysis, four interconnected themes emerged as central to participants’ understanding, discourse, practice and imagination of digital touch for remote personal communication. These were explored and refined through further engagement with the workshop materials, and collections of interactional data sequences significant for touch (e.g. comments on touch, touching materials, objects and others) were built around each theme. Thematic vignettes attuned to the multimodal and multi-sensorial were produced, providing an analytical account of participants’ process of discovering, defining, developing, designing and demonstrating the touch-interfaces in the workshops. These enabled us to identify and unpack the social and physical possibilities, and constraints that participants explored and considered regarding touch experiences. Collectively these four themes, discussed in the following section, are indicative of emergent sociotechnical imaginaries of touch for remote personal communication.

Materiality

The mutually constitutive relationship between users and communicative technologies is cyclical and interconnected (Hutchby, 2001). Affordances are a key aspect of that relationship, as the possibilities and constraints for meaning making are continually shaped through social and cultural histories (including that of the sign-maker) and the context of use (Kress, 2010). Materialities, including those of the body, are central to the take-up, subversion, disruption and reshaping of digital touch affordances. The materiality of the sociotechnical imagination matters because it is a part of how technologies constrain and make possible what people can do (and mean) with them. In the case of digital touch the materiality and affordances for the ‘feel’ of the fabric of sociotechnical imaginaries of digital touch communication were significant for how people might engage and interact.

Workshop participants discussed their experiences of interfaces, their technical and social challenges and influences on remote communication. Reflecting on changes over the past decade, they spoke of the significance of materiality for communication, from letters, to phones and changing place of the voice and images (e.g. via social media). The process of prototyping enabled participants to explore the materiality of interfaces. The Haptic Chair group, for example, wanted a ‘natural’, ‘invisible’, ‘smooth’ interface to enable ‘communication to flow’ both metaphorically and literally engaging with the physicality of touch through their selection of materials for prototyping. While some groups maintained or extended existing touch-interfaces in playful ways (e.g. ‘The enormous phone cover idea’ that became Tactile emoji – Figure 1, P2), six prototypes opened up the materialities of the touch screen as interface (Figure 1, Haptic Chair [P1], Sparking presence [P3], Blocker [P4], Bed-touch [P5], Emotional whirl [P6], Walk the dog [P9]). Nonetheless, ‘old’ (predigital and early digital) interface features persisted: keyboards, types of controllers and most resilient of them all – buttons. In each case, buttons (an everyday mechanism, e.g. to indicate on or off) were added to an interface in response to usage or ethical dilemmas raised through the groups’ bodily enactments with their prototypes:

The Haptic Chair group are discussing how they will know someone is ‘present’ and wanting to communicate. A member of the group picks up the ‘nudge’ post-it note, and says: Maybe you could have a nudge then, maybe you could have an extra vibration when someone else sits in their chair [the corresponding chair] to let you know they are there in case you want to interact with them, and you can decide whether you accept it or not [points at a silicone ‘button’]? Their talk links the interface to their experiences of existing communicative devices: phones and cameras. Through the process of making, the group move toward the idea of ‘closing distance’ through an interface that was ‘quiet’, ‘intuitive’, ‘natural’ and ‘invisible’, so as not to be remarked on, via a whole-body sensory interface.

The persistence of buttons, even in the context of digital whole-body interfaces, is suggestive of an emergent sociotechnical imagination of touch embedded in ideas of human versus machinic touch and affect (Paterson, 2007: 115): that is, touch as a significant human agentive action preceeding the digital or entailing a merging of different machinic and organic ‘bodies of production’ (Manning, 2007: 93). The prototypes articulated concerns about living in a ‘touchless’ world and a desire to return to more physical controls, responsive, ‘real’ and tactile textured feeling (Plotnick, 2017). This can be seen, we argue, as an incidence of resisting ‘new epistemological ordering and deployment of the senses’ in respect to the tactile modernity of the twentieth century (Parisi, 2011: 210).

Materiality was significant for participants’ experiences with and responses to Kissenger:

The participants (Touch-Cape group) are interacting with Kissenger: P1 ‘It doesn’t feel like a kiss, the texture is plastic, there is no warmth, and the rest of the device doesn’t feel like a face, so it’s like kissing a piece of plastic . . . it sounds very robotic’. They hold the Kissengers, press and touch them with their fingers and discuss how the robotic sound would puncture and disrupt interaction: P2 ‘I don’t want to hear the vibration, I want to feel it!’ P1 [Stroking the interface] ‘Maybe other materials – silicon more like a mouth? P2 [running her hand over the “lips” on Kissenger] should shape and divide the mouth shape with texture, not flat, it should be more sensitive’. They hold it to their cheeks. P3 ‘If we imagine a deformable surface it could give you the relief of your lips?’

Participants associated materiality with sensitive touch with a soft, flexible and malleable materiality, and the potential for leaving touch traces. Materiality was key to the distinctions participants made between human and non-human touch.

The body and touch

Participants brought the multimodal and multi-sensorial body into their prototypes differently. All consistently commented that the affordances of technologies ‘demand talk’ and ‘strip’ communication and the ‘lack’, the ‘not enough-ness’ of digital remote communication, notably in relation to the absence of touch. Two prototypes echo industry touch norms and trends, and focus touch on the hand and forearm (e.g. Tactile emoticon; Figure 1 [P2]) and Mood ball [P7]), one extended them by separating the body into zones of low-social-risk, the face (ear and cheek) and feet (e.g. Intimate connections [P8]); and seven brought the whole body into the touch experience (three of which we briefly discuss).

The Blocker prototype (Figure 1, P4) situated touch as problematic, classified good and bad emotions triggered by touch, and amplified positive whole-body touch-sensations:

‘Sometimes touch is really painful. What I really wanna communicate is “don’t touch me!” and that is very hard, particularly in a busy city’. [She throws a handful of brightly coloured small fluffy balls at a paper bag with a brick wall drawn on it.] ‘I’m imagining that all the bad emotions can get filtered off! Like [reads-out-loud the touch word post-its attached to the prototype] “tingling,” “shooting,” “burning,” “stabbing” – leaving them behind, and’ [she holds a sparkling pipe cleaner key, leans forward, places it on a drawn keyhole, and ‘unlocks’ it] the good emotions can get through. [She reaches inside the bag pulls out some post-it touch words and reads aloud] ‘Things like cuddling, cradling, and massaging, so that they can be sensed like where ever your threshold is’.

This points to the ways in which particular kinds of bodies are considered, included or excluded, in emergent sociotechnical imaginaries of digital touch. The prototypes were developed in relation to imagined gendered and sexual bodies, themes implicitly explored through participants’ discussion of age, gender and culture via discussions of size and the social acceptance or appropriateness of touch. With the exception of the Blocker, the groups’ prototyping processes suggest relatively healthy bodies and that some bodies are more readily thought of as being open for touching. Most of the prototypes were also designed for ‘available’ bodies waiting, sitting, sleeping or relaxing domesticated (in-door) bodies. These in-active and leisurely bodies both disrupt a common association of the digital with an idealized disciplined working body (Parisi and Farnham, 2019) and situate touch as an intimate and private communicative mode.

In contrast, the Sparking presence prototype (Figure 1, P3) placed touch on and in the body to create an always-ready body. A felt ‘sparking’ sensation, a ‘just-perceptual sense of co-presence’ created a sense of ‘belonging’, or ‘connected presence’ between the users (Madianou, 2016) to suggest the potential for a shared body:

Sparking Presence: You have this thing [she is holding a silvery ball of wool to her body] something physical – this little thing [she stokes the ball down her body] – it is an embodied thing. Affect it’s like the thing that flies between people. It’s ‘affecting the movement of the air around it’. They speak of the nuance of touch ‘connecting with people on same wave length’. Each participant made a personalized wearable, to interact with the ‘base control’. ‘It feels like you are attached, rather than holding something, it’s in me, a comfort or an attachment’.

The Emotional whirl group explored the sensoriality of communication – the ‘feel of emotion’, and developed the idea of touch interaction as a part of embodying emotional expression, that can relieve or help manage emotions:

They are exploring textures and tactile sensations through their interaction with a range of materials, they talk about how these evoke, represent or intersect with emotional states. A participant is whittling wooden skewers into sharp points, she inserts these into a playdoh ball. She says, ‘Pain – a spikey thing hurts when you hold it’. Touching it produces pain, another participant rolls it in her hand and grimaces. Happiness is made, it consists of a bunch of feathers ‘Lots of colour and it feels happy – like a pet [they stroke it gently with their hands and cheeks], lots of endomorphins releasing, this will make you feel better if you pat that!’.

Through their embodied interaction, they develop a ‘tactile and sensory’ interface designed to respond to users who feel ‘disconnected’ via the distancing emotionally stripped out technologies.

While prototyping, participants discussed (and experienced some of) the gendered, cultural and religious social taboos of touching bodies (their own and others). Engaging with Kissenger as a technology probe provoked physical unease between men and women, and more markedly, between men. Touching was performed as a gendered normative practice – even when mediated by a machine:

Two female participants are using the kissenger. Two male participants (P1 and P2) stand back, their arms crossed.

P1 ‘How would you feel if it was erm, me and you?’

P2 [Grimacing and leaning away] ‘That would be an interesting experiment!’

P1 ‘But why? It’s a machine, it’s a machine in the middle of it’.

P2 ‘Just, but it’s still trying to make an intimate interaction.’

P1 [Holds up Kissenger] ‘Sorry mate, brace yourself now’.

They both hold Kissenger up to their mouths and look at each other.

P2 says in a ‘seductive’ tone ‘Hello there’. They each start to make noises, ‘mmh, mmr’ while pressing their mouths to the kissenger.

P1 [Moves backwards a little as if feeling pressure, continues to press his mouth against it] ‘Oh!’ [Smiling he takes the Kissenger away from his face] ‘Tongue!’

P2 ‘Weird!’

This raises the question of whether, how and why future digital touch would continue or disrupt the work of gendering of touch, a question to be explored in future work. Both the gendered body and communication were seen to be at risk through touch. Edging beyond the hand, forearm or upper arm in their prototypes elicited discussion of the ethics of touching, including power and control. The ability of the Blocker prototype (Figure 1, P4) to facilitate touch through establishing ‘boundaries’, ‘blocking’ and ‘filtering’ it, provided the most explicit focus for this discussion. While all agreed that users should be able to block a touch, whether or not a receiver should be able to change/manipulate a touch that they receive (e.g. make it stronger or weaker, or receive it on an unintended part of the body) was more contentious regarding authenticity, touch misunderstandings and communication breakdown.

Emplaced touch

Participants approached digital touch as more intense, and riskier than other forms of communication. Imaginations of the primary space for touch were in the home. Suggesting home served as a generic symbol of a safe and neutral backdrop for touch (even if not always true). The home imagined as a place where the body is at rest, static with a calm heartbeat, ready to be ‘activated’ through touch: the touch equivalent of the sonic-quiet sought for a spoken conversation appears. Place and space were consistently discussed as key to how technology and communication mutually constitute, organize and structure one another and their practices. They reflected on pre-mobile phone memories: ‘having to sit on the stairs [on the landline phone] in the hall of my parents’ house on the landline phone, and I would spend hours talking to people’. Participants spoke of the how mobile connectivity reconfigures their spaces of communication to stretch and shrink communicational time and language (e.g. across public and private transport). They associated the ‘anywhere, anytime’ dimension of mobility to authentic ‘in-the-moment-communication’, but disrupted this contemporary mantra in the ways they imagined the time and space of digital touch. The excerpt below is typical of discussions of ‘where’ touch should happen:

The Touch-Cape group have returned to the materials table, one member of the group is wrapping a piece of fabric around the fore-arm of another. A third says: ‘I think we have to think about context. [She is pointing at the two participants.] Where would this happen? Not on the street? It’s so personal. I wouldn’t feel comfortable. You are walking in the street. I want to sit on the sofa at home and feel this warmth, cos its’ like personal. Out of the home –NO!’

None of the groups included mobility as a key concept for their design of digital touch remote personal communication. Two prototypes envisaged touch as part of a mobile device used outside neither of which involved touch with another person: The Blocker (Figure 1, P4) in the context of a crowded urban transport system, and Walk the dog (P9) in a public space (e.g. park). The other prototypes located digital touch in a domestic and private place: typically, the home. Although the Haptic Chair group considered that a young user might be interested in a ‘mobile’ add-on, which could be rolled out over ‘any chair’ where they have significant waiting time (e.g. at an airport). Suggesting the public character of touch was associated with age or generation.

Temporality of touch

Through the prototyping process the participants worked with technological, social and emotional temporal features of touch, all of which were central to their sociotechnical imagination of digital touch. In doing so, their prototypes had different touch temporalities which informed the design of the communication experience in significant ways. The touch temporalities they designed were shaped through their experiences of different media in terms of communicational ‘time-effort’, ‘immediacy’, ‘spontaneity’ and ‘speed’ and managing ‘response time’, and ‘obligations and expectations’. They also drew on temporal associations, including remote ‘real-time’ communication with a ‘state of emergency’ (e.g. a sister’s pregnancy, a family death). The difficulties of coordinating communication across time zones were a consistent consideration, ‘I was getting texts from my mom in the middle of the night!’, as was the temporality of personal relationships (Licoppe, 2004). Temporal features included the duration of a touch-experience, social timing of touch (e.g. a special, every-day or routine time), the a-synchronicity or synchronicity of a sent touch. Prototyping enabled them to explore the practicalities of receiving and responding to a digital touch (e.g. the ability to turn touch on or off), the social time and place for touch (‘not in the street!’) and the communicational consequence of not being available to receive a touch were explored through prototyping (e.g. the potential, and consequences, for scheduling-touch, the inclusion or exclusion of record and replay features – pause, repeat), the storage of touch and timed-filters to manipulate touch (e.g. ‘amplify’, ‘reduce’ or ‘remove’ touch).

Several prototypes had fast, momentary, fleeting ephemeral touch temporalities. Tactile emoji (Figure 1, P2) gave a felt ‘Facebook poke’, Sparking presence (P3), Emotional whirl (P6) and Mood ball (P7) engaged with felt emotional expression, fleeting sensations of presence, and dispersing touch-based memories. In contrast, participants in the other six groups expressed a desire to ameliorate the social impacts of a (too) fast communication temporality, ‘it’s something I do in gaps in my schedule now . . . It makes it feel more piecemeal’. While two of these prototypes were temporally orchestrated around a routine time (e.g. Walk the dog [P9], Bed-touch [P5]), others rejected this temporal structuring as ‘too staged’, ‘practiced’ and feeling ‘in-authentic’. Some groups set out to create an ‘un-orchestrated immediacy’, with dedicated time for touch communication rather than a ‘squeezed in touch’; they designed an element of excitement and anticipation (imagination) of touch into their prototypes. This suggests that, at least for some participants, digital touch has the potential to recover time, a form of resistance to the disciplining of the communicative body desired by contemporary industry and capital (Parisi and Farnham, 2019). The temporal aspects of performativity were, participants suggested, a challenge for the Kissenger, as a user would have to ‘plan a kiss’ by saying ‘put it to your mouth’ or in a good night scenario giving a child an ‘instruction to hold it to your cheek’.

Three prototypes include a touch record feature. The Blocker (Figure 1, P4) recorded touch in order for it to be received at a ‘better time’, the Haptic Chair (P1) and Touch-Cape (P10) recorded touch to manage the pragmatics of spontaneous communication. Participants explored how to record touch and what that might feel like, trying out the traces of touch on their own bodies or using thought experiments. The Haptic Chair group designed the potential for a ‘body message’ – a touch message, recording taps, movements, the ‘shape of the body and its impression’ – via pressure and heat, which could be played and felt. The multi-sensorial environment of the haptic chair affirmed the importance of place, sound and visual (imaginations) for touch-based experiences. However, the recording and replaying of touch, for instance, was considered by participants to fundamentally transform touch as an (embodied and emplaced) experience, moving touch from a simultaneous mutual exchange to an individual experience or ‘fragmented’ experience. This decoupling of ‘toucher’ and ‘touched’ raised concerns regarding the ethics and techniques of storing and sharing digital touch. Non-reciprocal touch prompted discussion of touch consent: if a touch could be given and not received simultaneously, when would one consent to touch, what would it mean to not do so and what might determine touch ownership in this scenario? Replaying touch opened up concerns for many participants about the ‘addictive’, ‘savouring’ of digital touch that enabled a person to become immersed in a familiar virtual touch landscape, leading to isolation, ‘a lack of connection to others’. The temporality of digital touch, its ease, availability and replay, led participants to express fears regarding the dehumanizing potential of digital touch: ‘If all hugs [digital and non-digital] will feel the same – how will people distinguish? How to trust? How to protect?’ Ultimately, they expressed the fear of machinic touch becoming more desirable (simpler and more readily available) than human touch, a fear with deep roots, from the Greek myth of Laodamia who fell in love with a bronze likeness of her dead husband (Devlin, 2019: 18) through to sex robots.

A narrative of an emergent sociotechnical imaginary of digital touch

The four thematic strands presented above – materiality, embodiment, emplacement and digital touch temporalities, weave through one another to make legible an emerging sociotechnical imaginary of digital touch for remote personal communication. The themes coexist and intersect with each other and point towards broad sensory practices and norms of touch.

Reflecting on the participants’ engagement with the materialities of digital touch, it is clear that this is central to the sociotechnical imaginaries of digital touch communication. While digital touch continued to be associated with some specific functions – alert, activation and feedback, the sensorial experiences it afforded were a key aspect of sociotechnical imaginaries. This sensorial aspect foregrounded the potential for new digital touch experiences beyond the screen and the hand. Digital touch was presented as a smooth and natural materiality, in which texture and temperature were imbued with emotional meanings and seen as part of a communicational repertoire for interpretation. Sensitive touch was associated with a soft and flexible materiality, was malleable by users and had the potential to leave a mark or trace of touch. Materiality was key to the distinctions between human touch and robotic or machinic touch, with the former valued as soft, warm, flexible and reactive, and the later devalued as the opposite. The material qualities and associations of digital touch communication are, we argue, key to how people engage with them.

While participants found it difficult to articulate the communicative value of touch, there was a desire for it to be a digital communicational possibility. With explicit reference to the #MeToo movement and sexual abuse more generally, touch was seen as complex and risky, and remote digital touch as even risker. Several binaries of touch were expressed and explored through the prototyping process: touch as good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate, private and public. Within the social touch spaces of the sociotechnical imaginary, new concerns arose related to the digital sharing of touch, authenticity and fake-touch through the digital manipulation of touch. A shared social understanding of touch sensitivities, awareness, etiquette and regulation is essential to enable touch to enter the realm of digital communication. While on the one hand participants expressed fears that digitally mediating touch could lead to disillusion and disconnection, on the other, they shared a sociotechnical imaginary of digital touch that generated new possibilities for remote digital touch. The sociotechnical imaginaries embedded in the prototypes embraced the potentials of a richer bodily landscape for digital touch communication, although some reflected industry norms in their focus touch as the hand and most did not engage with the realities of bodily difference – working with an archetype able-bodied male body, and associated touch experiences and sensitivities. Nonetheless, digital touch was seen as having potential to support new forms of connection and attachment, including changing boundaries between bodies, shareable touch-experiences, and more porous fluid boundaries between technology and the body. How the body is brought into relationship with digital touch, the kinds of relationships established between them, are, we suggest, central to how people engage with digital touch communication.

Emplacement features in the sociotechnical imagination of digital touch, with the space for touch, at least for now, being domestic and private. Three analytical rationales appeared to underpin this domestication of digital touch. First, the social and cultural meaning of touch as intimate and the taboo on intimacy in public – a norm that polices touch in many cultures (e.g. public displays of affection – PDA). Second, a desire to maintain and manage touch as having a ‘slower’ temporal quality that makes it ‘more personal, more intense’ than other modes of communication and a private place (discussed in the temporality of touch). Third, a sense that digital touch requires a ‘prepared place’ – the need to tidy a room or carefully frame a web-camera, or change a top to prepare for video-chat. Preparation is a feature of most forms of communication, remote or face-to-face, digital or non-digital. This includes a preparing and imagination of the self and the other for communication (Cantó-Milà and Núñez-Mosteo, 2016: 2409). However, the participant discussions and their prototypes suggest that digital touch highlights the need for preparation and a key aspect of that process is privacy and allotting dedicated time, qualities that are not a feature of mobile communication. We can envision how social norms or technological peripherals may lessen over repeated use, to ameliorate or purposively dull this imagined intensity of digital touch, enabling digital touch to come out of the home. This would be akin to the changing social norms of talking loudly about intimate personal matters when talking on a mobile phone (while wearing headphones) on public transport (Brown et al., 2002). We suggest that social digital touch practices and capacities are likely to emerge from the home, that preparations for digital touch communication will accompany this shift and that this will give rise to a need for different kinds of ‘touch sensitivity’ training for managing communication.

Reflecting on what the temporality of time tells us about sociotechnical imaginaries and engagement with digital touch, we suggest that digital touch is positioned as a more intimate, private and sensorial, felt way of digitally being-together. That is, digital touch is imagined to extend the ‘ambient-presence’ afforded by long-duration Skype, and resonate strongly with evolving temporal practices of digitally connected or mediated presence (Christensen, 2009; Madianou, 2016). Digital touch was conceptualized as slow and long, connecting people through everyday routines (e.g. Walk the dog, Figure 1, P9) or the settled touch of domestic intimacy (e.g. the Haptic Chair [P1], Bed-touch [P5]). This created new moments for digital touch to unfold, and to be managed and shared across time differences. Digital touch draws on the potentials of touch temporalities to secure permanence and the management of the blurry boundaries between absence and presence (Licoppe, 2004). In this way, participants conceptualized digital touch for remote personal communication as having different temporal durations and qualities than visual and audio modes. Digital touch had a longer duration in contrast to the bite-size voice message or mobile call, the brevity of a written text or tweet, or the visual flash of snapchat or Instagram. This, together with our discussion of the qualities of emplaced and embodied touch, sets digital touch apart from contemporary ‘anytime, anywhere, anybody’ modes of communication.

As the presentation and discussion of the four themes in this article shows, the sociotechnical imaginaries of digital touch resonate with previous moments of co-emerging communicative practices, and are shaped by the interconnectedness of developments in digital touch and existing media and communication practices. Nuanced narratives of losses and gains cut across participants’ engagement with digital touch, and the continuities and changes of their experiences, memories and histories of remote personal communication are embedded within the sociotechnical imaginaries of digital touch. These themes provide insight into the social and physical possibilities and constraints for digital touch that appear to be considered regarding users’ touch experiences and expectations that may endure and shape the futures of digital touch. They point to some potential directions of digital touch for remote personal communication futures: what digital touch might be, who might touch whom and where digital touch happens, as well as the capacities and practices of touch, future concerns regarding changing forms of connection and communicative practices. Together, the themes set digital touch communication apart from the contemporary mantra of ‘anytime, anywhere, anybody’ communication, in the sense that touch is imagined for a prepared special time, in a private domestic place and within an existing intimate friendship, family relationship or partnership.