Living with Touchscreens: Haptic Geographies of Home in the Digital Context

Abstract

This article considers haptic—the sense of touch in all its forms—as an assemblage of performative and situated knowledge, multisensory experiences, digital and material relationalities, and everyday practices, that is shaping and shaped by domestic atmospheres and affects. It brings research topics on haptic geographies and geographies of home into the digital context to investigate how routinized domestic practices are digitally organized and managed and how the feelings of being at home are significantly embodied, materially engaged, and socially and affectively charged. The key findings have developed the geographical understanding of home on material, socioemotional, embodied, and multisensory process of home-making by establishing a touching assemblage in the digital context of home. This touching assemblage has affectively created the domestic atmosphere by coalescing practices, materials, apps, global and local platform capitalism, data, bodies, and domestic environments. This article challenges the ocular-centric and Euro-centric way of studying screen-based technologies. It argues for an embodied, affective, and multisensory conceptualization of home in the digital context and a more comprehensive understanding of how the interplay between the human body, space, and technology are implicated in the process of making and remaking geographies of home.