Mouse, Screen and Console: The Capabilities and Ethics of Touch-Enabled Technologies

Abstract

My research on touch developed out of an earlier project about multi-media texts, which was based on many years experience as a literacy and website consultant. That work focused on the texts (websites) that were being produced as the result of the recent development of digital technology, which had enabled individuals and organizations to use an increasing variety of resources to communicate with the world and had given them worldwide distribution, if not always visibility. I was concerned at the expansion in literacy these texts required, including not only words and images, but also spatiality and layout, and more recently sound and movement. This prompted questions about how this new technology was changing our understanding of literacy, as signalled by the development of notions such as literacies, literacy repertoires, multi-literacies and multi-media literacies. But at the same time, I was concerned with how this new literacy, or literacies, was changing us as embodied subjects; how was our performance and embodiment of this new literacy creating a new kind of individual subject? What did it mean when we stopped writing by hand or with a typewriter? What was the significance of the increasing distance of our physical touch from the text we produced? Did that change the nature of our literacy, and there-fore our understanding of the world and of our selves?