The Lost Sense

OR: The Marginalization of Touch in a Digital World

One of the greatest tragedies of the digital revolution, of the smartphone revolution, may be how it’s completely marginalized one of our five senses: touch.¹

Smartphones swallow up our sense of touch.

The sheer number of tools and toys that have been replaced by an app on my phone is mind blowing. Pen, paper, calculator, notebook, novel, telephone, wall clock, wallet, credit cards, photos, maps, video games. Sure, it’s convenient, cost-efficient, and space-saving, but it’s thrown me into a serious case of texture withdrawal. I yearn to feel the coarseness of sketch paper, the silky fibers of an extravagant floor rug, and maybe some

Like someone with iron deficiency anemia craves ice (“pica”), I crave texture.

I’m sitting at my laptop typing this essay, and all I feel is the base of my palm resting against the slight cold of my MacBook’s sturdy silver gray base, my fingers tapping the smooth letter keys, submitting to my will from the subtlest pressure. And that’s about it. For as long as I’m here writing this essay, that’s all I will feel.

In a fully digitized, always online world (we’re almost there), touch is a lost sense.

Texture withdrawal surfaces a primal urge.

I’ve found myself instinctively trying to reclaim the sense of touch that’s lost.

I went through a phase of reading only online — websites, blogs, ebooks, PDFs, Kindle — and then listening only via audiobooks and podcasts. But a few years into this, I found myself yearning to buy the physical copy, even though it would cost more, arrive later, and find itself sitting on a shelf after I’m done. All for the primal urge to feel the texture of a printed page, some smooth and sharp-edged enough to give you a paper cut, others with the slightest raised marbled texture, as if you were reading the topography of rolling plains with your fingertips. Even more primal is the act of turning a page with urgency and your own stylistic flair.

This urge started extending to other things — to buying physical notebooks to jot down little thoughts and references that spring up during the day. To buying a sketchbook in lieu of doing everything on my iPad. To buying a Polaroid camera, a wall clock, insisting on keeping my physical debit card, buying an analog phone (though not for the vintage / nostalgia need so much as its physical embodiment).

Loss of touch is a silent mood killer.

Touch is the first of our senses to develop, providing us with the sensory scaffold on which we come to perceive our own bodies and our sense of self.² Touch is important in brain and social and emotional development.

Extreme sensory deprivation is rare, but it’s been shown to cause anxiety, depression, feelings of monotony, other bad psychological effects. On the other hand, sensory stimulation helps with learning, adaptation, and neural plasticity.

Much of this research is based on childhood development, but adults need much of the same (even if they’re more resilient to mild or temporary deprivation).

It’s remarkable that we’ve dulled a sense so strongly and no one seems to have noticed.

The loss of touch is not lamented, rarely if ever talked about. Instead, there are parallel or perhaps overarching movements that render this an afterthought at best. We talk of the negative mental health effects of always being online, the social deprivation that occurs as a result, the contribution to poor physical health due to sedentary, indoor lifestyles. We present studies of these negative impacts, and we colloquially tell people to “touch grass” as in go outside, get offline.

a buffet of rope toys for dogs

Touch is reclaimed in the physical world.

Thankfully, the prescription to spend more time outside, in the physical world, is one that naturally soothes texture withdrawal too. What you do to solve the other maladies of hyperdigital life will help solve this too, though only to an extent. Going for a walk outside doesn’t do enough for touch as it does for sight, smell, sound, getting exercise and clearing your mind.³

Unironically, one solution to make the human version of dog and cat toys: tactile toys, or as we’re used to calling them, fidgets. Give me more adult legos. And we should really invent texture libraries. One of my gripes with museums is that all they let you do is look.⁴ We need more museums where the point is to touch the art. This is one of the hidden perks of going shopping for anything in a retail store — you get to touch and feel. Half the fun of going to IKEA or any furniture store is being able to touch stuff, sit, lay down, intellectualize your finger tips.

Or perhaps more pragmatically, we can re-introduce texture in our lives via some of the tools and toys that we so readily gave up to the digital world. Move back from digital touch screens on everything to buttons, a nice side effect of switching back to flip phones or even the BlackBerry phones of 2000s fame.⁵ Install an analog phone at home, get a typewriter, cover the floor with plush rugs. (My personal favorite antidote — granny hobbies — are unmistakably texture-rich.)

What else exists in the physical world? Smartphones. Laptops. Devices of all kinds. They’re the portals for our digital addictions. Tactile experiences are increasingly dictated by the limited pieces of hardware that we use. Could we fundamentally change something about them? Reinvent the very things our digits interface with?

There’s literal surface level experimentation happening to simulate different textures within the touch screen area. Research suggests haptics can make this a reality, creating “a touchscreen that touches you back.” It’s a cool premise, but we need to be able to look beyond the shape, texture, and interface of the prevailing device leader — Apple (at least culturally in the US). New hardware, new textures.

This is at least one reason I’m thankful to see the increasing experimentation with consumer hardware (smart glasses, AI companions, wearables, even the return to flip phones). If we’re going to reclaim our sense of touch and range of tactile experience, we’ll have to redesign our devices and our relationship to them.

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via worrydream.com (shared by Jackson Dahl) (link)

Senses aren’t just tools for survival. They are gateways to a deeper understanding of the world around us, ourselves, and life itself. Touch is not just a sense — it’s what literally grounds us. It’s a reminder that we’re still here, in the real world.

Next time you reach for your smartphone, pause and consider what else you could reach for that offers not just a function, but some feeling. And if you are someone who creates, in any medium, challenge yourself to elevate touch to the level of other senses. This is about more than nostalgia; it’s about preserving a critical part of what makes life vivid and meaningful. Otherwise the default path we’re on will lead us into an empty room with just walls and screens — and not much else.

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1. There’s a paradox in the dual meanings of “digital” — one relates to digital signals expressed as series of 0 and 1, the other to our fingers, the digits, the purveyors of touch.

2. The Development of Tactile Perception (link)

3. It’s hard to isolate just one sense though. The best remedies will be multi-sensory.

4. As a semi-germaphobe, I’d advocate for cleaning protocols to keep communal touch spaces safe for the public!

5. Data-driven vibrotactile rendering of digital buttons on touchscreens (link)