Privacy's Waste Products: Touch, Contagion and Public Telephone Design

Gansky, Paul

doi:10.1093/jdh/ept042

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Questions about germs and disinfecting also cropped up in conversations and in articles, with tips about preventing illness and linking device filthiness to disease (Gordon, 2010). In this regard, touchscreens activated conversations about how one should police the boundaries and touches of her device, especially within shared/communal modes of media engagement (Gansky, 2014). These questions would resurface, as noted at the outset of this article, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and anxieties over tactile contamination.…”

Section: A Smudge Is a Hazard: Digitality As Dangermentioning

confidence: 99%

You Must Touch It: Touchscreen Hygiene and the Sin of the Smudge

Plotnick

2022

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Med

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This article examines how people have constructed touchscreen smudges, those oily marks left behind by users’ fingers on shiny glass, as a form of ‘mess’. It offers an historical account of smudges between 2007 and 2010, when users, corporations, journalists, third-party accessory manufacturers and others began to first frame smudges as a problem for mobile media due to users’ constant touching and the evidence of their finger trails which functioned as a kind of ‘ visible tactility’. Solutions took the form of engineering special screen coatings or cultivating responsible users who would maintain their devices through cleaning and caretaking practices. In both these cases, smudges were denigrated not for degrading media content or breaking the device’s functionality, but rather for violating high-tech aesthetics and drawing attention to porous, tactile and germ-riddled bodies. The piece, bringing together this case with the present, encourages scholars to attend to the ways that users are entreated to tame and groom both their bodies and their media devices in particular socio-historical contexts.

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Section: A Smudge Is a Hazard: Digitality As Dangermentioning

confidence: 99%

You Must Touch It: Touchscreen Hygiene and the Sin of the Smudge

Plotnick

2022

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Med

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Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences, 2014

2014

Isis

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Privacy's Waste Products: Touch, Contagion and Public Telephone Design

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

You Must Touch It: Touchscreen Hygiene and the Sin of the Smudge

You Must Touch It: Touchscreen Hygiene and the Sin of the Smudge

Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences, 2014

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