I Was a Kid Who Dug Holes
I was the kind of kid who dug holes, the deeper the better. I vividly recall the ecstasy of once splaying out my fingers in a bucket full of backyard dirt, a bliss punctuated only by a sudden burning sensation in my right hand that turned out to be my first-ever encounter with a fire ant.
The Textures of Memory
The textures of my childhood loom larger in my memory than sights or sounds. My first paper cut, on a piece of sheet music, and the rush of cold water my older sister used to wash away the blood. The warmth of my mother’s hug and the tender squeeze of my grandmother’s hand in mine. The whoosh of air I’d get from barreling a scooter down a hill, and the pristine crunch of stepping out into a winter’s first snow.
A Digital Detox
Eager to break my own screen addiction, I toggled my iPhone into grayscale a few years ago, an accessibility setting that renders everything in black and white. In the days that followed, I’d look up from my phone and marvel at the sense that suddenly, the world’s colors appeared more vibrant than they were before, dulled by my adjustment to highly saturated displays. It was as if I’d just kicked a really bad sugary candy habit and could once again appreciate the natural sweetness of a piece of fruit.
Warping of Our Senses
I’ve since been fascinated by the ways that our senses warp to adapt to our largely digital lives, and the extent to which those changes have seeped across our perceptions of the real world. I wanted to write this piece because I had a hunch that in the same way that screens had desensitized my eyes to color, perhaps the opposite was happening with our sense of touch: By spending so much time tapping on a screen, we’d become hypersensitive to the point of aversion to the textures of the world around us.
Evidence of Change
I found some evidence to this effect, including links between excessive screen use and sensory issues, like the overwhelm many neurodivergent children feel in response to certain textures. However, in conversations with experts, I also learned there has been a much longer societal arc away from engaging dynamically with our sense of touch, a loss that has had a profound impact on how we understand the world around us.
Growing Up in a Tactile World
This was the world where many of us grew up, one in which we felt our way toward understanding, sometimes playfully, sometimes a little painfully, sometimes both. To make a phone call, you once had to rotate a dial. Entering an apartment building meant turning a key inside a wobbly knob. Calculators and cameras used to be clunky, and writing was something you did with a pencil you sharpened yourself.
The Decline of Tactility
But now, almost everything gets done through the touch of a screen, and the sharper that resolution becomes, the fuzzier our sense of what’s real and what’s not becomes. We’re starved for clarity, and as we fall out of touch with the world — both literally and figuratively — we’re only getting more ravenous.
Craving Friction
“We’re aching for friction; we need and we crave friction,” said Mark Paterson, an expert on the sociology of touch at the University of Pittsburgh, because “it affirms ourselves and the boundaries between the self and the world.”
Retreating from Touch
To be an adult today is to literally lose touch, to recede into the contours of your workaday life, and to reserve your exertions to do or to produce, but less frequently to explore. And to never willingly expose yourself to the fire ants lurking in the dirt.
The Digital Shift
Growing up isn’t the only reason why the textures that stitched together my early memories — those lines between real and imaginary play — now fall as flat as a crushed juice box or a deflated birthday balloon. Like most Americans, I spend far too much of my time with my nose pressed to a glossy screen, electroconductive feedback loops replacing the many discrete activities my younger hands mastered.
If kids once grew up surrounded by a smorgasbord of textures, many of today’s iPad babies struggle to hold crayons or zip up their jackets by the time they enter kindergarten. Socializing is something we now do overwhelmingly online, with teens hanging out with their friends face-to-face nearly half as often as they did 20 years ago. We’re told to touch grass, but we keep touching screens: Americans spend 90 minutes less outside of the house now than they used to, and two-thirds of parents say they spent far more time outdoors as kids than their children do now.
The Impact on Development
“If the screen could imagine what its users look like,” Paterson told me, “then we’d be one big set of eyes and just one finger.” That one finger — or at most, two to four — is the dominant medium through which most young adults engage their sense of touch for over seven hours each day, tapping and texting and swiping for the equivalent of 106 days per year.
Touch Hunger
What so many people experience as screen fatigue might actually be better described as touch hunger, the unyielding sense that we don’t touch grass, touch one another, or touch textures — neither buttons, pens, nor dials — as often as we used to. In the quest to make our daily lives as frictionless as possible, we might be losing out on some of what makes life feel like life itself.
The Wonderful Interface
“The world is a wonderful interface to engage with,” said Rachel Plotnick, an expert in human-technology relationships at Indiana University. “Giving that up comes with a real loss.”
Montessori and Tactile Education
As the 19th century yawned into the 20th, an Italian physician named Maria Montessori opened up an experimental preschool for children cooped up in an impoverished tenement in Rome. The first Casa dei Bambini, as Montessori called it, embraced a pedagogy of touch, eschewing lectures in front of a blackboard in favor of sensory activities such as fastening buttons, sorting blocks, and sweeping corridors.
The Importance of Tactile Learning
“In order to form and maintain our intelligence, we must use our hands,” Montessori said decades later in 1946, by which time hundreds of schools around the world had adopted her methods and her name. The anxieties that first made Montessori’s educational innovations take off around the world will feel familiar to anyone nursing a smartphone addiction today. In the wake of the industrial revolution, nobody seemed to use their hands like they used to anymore.
By 1920, more Americans lived inside cities than outside of them. As that shift continued, entire generations of workers began to earn their living primarily using their minds, not their hands, for the first time. But the dawn of mass production also led to “real concern about bodily disengagement from the world,” said David Parisi, a professor of touch and digital technologies at New York University.
Benefits and Dangers of Modern Technology
There were ultimately tremendous benefits to these industrial era innovations, like more abundant food, the birth of modern medicine, and dramatically longer lifespans. However, the technological shift also represented an early manifestation of the “loss of what I like to think of as a certain type of epistemology,” Parisi said. “That sense of knowing through touch.” In the century since sliced bread began appearing on market shelves, our daily lives have only become more and more tactilely convenient, which is another way of saying still more physically disengaged.
“There is more touch on the screen than there is on other people,” Field said, “and that is a sorry experience.” Holding hands or hugging has been shown to reduce cortisol levels and flood your brain with happy hormones. Touching grass has a similar effect, as does engaging in physical hobbies like collaging or ceramics.
The Future of Tactility
There are some indications that the world has reached its anti-tactile breaking point. Dissatisfaction with our touch-deprived status quo has spilled out in the form of fidget spinners and the revival of the printed word, flip phones, clackity keyboards, wristwatches, and grannycore hobbies like ceramics or crochet.
“People want that tactility, that physicality,” Parisi said, of textures as benign as “the play button on a cassette deck.” They crave the subtle etched sound grooves of a vinyl record — sales of which surpassed $1 billion last year for the first time since the last century. “I think the tide is turning.”
Even schools have begun locking up kids’ phones altogether, mandating recess, and forcing students to return to handwriting. Critically, car companies are also bringing back physical buttons as people express a hunger for tactile feedback. “People seem to have a hunger for physical buttons, both because you don’t always have to look at them — you can feel your way around for them — but also because they offer a greater range of tactility and feedback,” Plotnick noted.
While the touchscreen is not inherently evil, there is a need to assess how our interaction with these devices shapes our reality. If we neglect our tactile experiences, we risk losing connections not only with each other but also with our own memories. The ultimate challenge lies in integrating the best elements of both tactile exploration and technological convenience.
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