Being-in-touch: The (im)possibilities of communicative and tactile connection in online experiences

Abstract

Amid social distancing and the sole reliance on communication technologies to “keep in touch” precipitated by COVID-19, touch, both communicatively and tactically, emerged in complex ways. This study examines Airbnb Online Experiences as a new media offering possibilities for people to be “in touch” with others around the world through short-lived interactive activities on Zoom. While new media technologies traditionally expand the potential for sustained connection and increasingly replicate elements of “in-person” communication, this emerging digital phenomenon, although enabling wider communicative reach and enhanced somatic experience, exists in fleeting, physically distanced connections. Through ethnography, the article examines how participants navigate circumstances of touch in online experiences, both by ways of communicative contact and physical proximity. The term being-in-touch is proposed, inspired by works on touch from relational ontological perspectives, to capture the multiple meanings and many ways of being in touch, exploring the relational nature and (im)possibilities of connection.

Introduction

Touch is a multimeaning word. When the word touch is put with other words in a sentence or expression, the concept of “just which kind of touch” is being referred to becomes clear. For example, touch is frequently used to convey motives or behaviors of communication such as, “let’s keep in touch,” expressing the desire to stay in contact with someone, or “we lost touch,” denoting a usually unintentional and slow ceasing of communication with another. The actual verb to touch primarily refers to the body coming directly into contact with someone or something physically outside of it, “they touched their shoulder,” or “I touched the floor.” Here, touch is a tangible act, which even in noun form such as “their touch,” conveys a possessive somatic ontology based on physical proximity. Often, idioms such as the former (touch relating to communication) have their roots in a more literal and dictionary-based sense of the word. Through my fieldwork engaging in Airbnb Online Experiences during COVID-19, I examine how participants navigate new circumstances of touch in its polysemic nature, both by ways of communicative contact and physical proximity, and how multiple meanings of touch and their possibilities are entangled.

Airbnb Online Experiences are live interactive events facilitated by hosts over Zoom where people can meet and interact with others from around the world for an activity-based experience. I analyze the nature of the short-lived, temporal social interactions within online experiences ¹ and my interlocutors’ understanding of communicative touch during the pandemic period. Online experiences are a form of digital sociality offering new possibilities for people to reach one another or be “in touch.” At the same time, their processes and impossibilities for sustained communication contradict the usual trend in the development of communication technologies that advance humans’ ability to sustain and increase communicative contact, as they exist as one-off events with no means of continued communication. Within this exploration of seeming contradiction, I illustrate how human-to-human physical touch along with the communicative ability to “keep in touch” is simultaneously missing while taking new forms for my interlocutors in online experiences. Not only have advancements in communication technologies established a greater capacity for sustained interpersonal communication (Bakardjieva, 2005; Baym, 2015; Pertierra, 2018; Wilson and Peterson, 2002) but they have also increasingly engaged somatic capabilities (Jewitt et al., 2020; Parisi, 2018) that replicate qualities of “in-person” communication, as seen through auditory capacities and the optical transmission of video calling (Harper et al., 2019; Madianou and Miller, 2012; Miller and Sinanan, 2014). Online experiences, a phenomenon highly somatic in nature, deny the ability for a participant to touch (or more accurately, be physically near) another participant cross-screen due to the digital context of the events. So, in a world consisting of technologies developed to give users greater ability for sustained social contact and expanded somatic potential, how are participants making sense of online experiences with their fleeting and proximally distanced nature riddled with certain connective impossibilities?

As identified by my interlocutors, touch in the long-term communicative sense as well as touch based in physical proximity are recognized as two impossible modes of relating in their encounters during online experiences. What becomes clear through this unique mode of interaction is that participants are not necessarily mourning the connections that might be made through further sustained contact with others under different circumstances or lamenting the fact that they cannot physically touch other participants cross-screen. They first grapple with how to make sense of their connective situations and eventually come to terms with a technological experience where possibilities of further connection are withdrawn. As will be discussed through the ethnography of this study, participants are not necessarily missing the actual acts of “touching,” be they touch through communication or something more tactile, instead, they are missing the ability to touch, in their minds resulting in potentially more profound and unrealized connections with others.

New contexts of connection have challenged and activated people’s perceptions of how they relate with others in a unique period of time when they found themselves relying heavily on communication technology to connect with others from a physical distance (Treré et al., 2020: 606; Watson et al., 2021). Connection, as mentioned in this article, refers to the general definitory sense of the word as a relation in which something is linked with something else and, as such, implies “touching” between two or more entities. ² I show that online experiences offer an unusual type of being-in-touch, a term I suggest that aims to capture the many ways of being in touch inspired by relational ontological approaches, including (but not limited to) the works on touch by Jean-Luc Nancy (1997) and Karen Barad (2012). Plainly put, being-in-touch refers to the relational nature and (im)possibilities of connection. Being-in-touch implies a multiplicity, as touch can never be figured in a singular way, and its (im)possibilities contain the possible and impossible wrapped into one another co-constitutively. As such, being-in-touch recognizes touch in its many forms and serves to comment on ontological and epistemological becomings of relatedness from a posthumanist perspective. ³ Participants in online experiences navigate being-in-touch in complex ways, ultimately recognizing the possibilities of connection that it does offer and accepting the impossibilities of the experience, one which continues in memory. Ultimately, the article looks to varied ways of touching and relatedness both in scholarly thought and in the empirical case of online experiences, proposing the term being-in-touch to support further considerations and explorations of touch in new media with an emphasis on the relationality, multiplicity, and (im)possibilities of connection.

Touch, a relational approach

Historically, touch has been highly associated with human communication technologies and communication processes. In pre-electric communication processes, for people to “be in touch,” acts of physical touching were required. Correspondence—think pony express, sending an emissary, or pigeon carry—came with a physically mobile and oftentimes contact-based (as in the touching of another person or shared object) element of delivery. A sort of geographical nearness or the closing of any distance had to be enacted by some form of movement connecting the communicating parties. Through the “effective separation of communication from transportation” (Carey, 2009: 157), developments in electric modes of communication—think telegraph, telephone, Internet—increased the synchronicity and reliable permanency of communication, allowing people to be reached from a multitude of geographical locations not limited by distance, physical human stagnation, or asynchronous (delayed) message reception. Continuous developments in communication technologies and new media have greatly expanded the variety, capacity, and contexts in which humans connect with one another (Baym, 2015; Dourish and Bell, 2007; Ginsburg et al., 2002; Lievrouw and Livingstone, 2002; Van Dijck, 2013 to name a mere few). With these advancements, “touching” in communicative contexts has become less about mobility and more about reachability, as in the ways in which people create and sustain connections and how they do so with the technologies in their proximal reach.

Touch has been a recent focus of new media technology studies in both these social and sensory ways, bridging multidisciplinary scholarship and inspiring interdisciplinary collaboration (Jewitt et al., 2020; Jewitt et al., 2021; Parisi et al., 2017). A growing body of media literature has attended to the meanings and the historical situatedness of touch and haptics (Classen, 2012; Cranny-Francis, 2011; Parisi, 2018; Paterson, 2017), understandings of digital (mediated) social touch, and sensorial experiences of touch-based technologies and haptic media (Hodges, 2017; Jewitt et al., 2020; Parisi et al., 2017; Verhoeff and Cooley, 2014; among many others) often from phenomenological (Liberati, 2017; Marks, 2002; Paterson, 2007) or postphenomenological (Richardson and Hjorth, 2017) perspectives. Communication and media studies’ understandings of touch in digital phenomena have focused less on connection and relate more to sensory systems and phenomenological understandings of “felt” being (Paterson, 2007: 15–35). To varying degrees, these understandings accentuate a “being-in-the-world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968) through intercorporeality that implies an entanglement of materiality and bodily existence in the world, consisting of the sense-making of oneself and copresent others as body subjects. Yet, as will be explored through the following ethnography, my interlocutors do not approach touch in a similarly “sensuous-social” nature; they speak not of the acts of touching or “bodies” that touch but of abilities and possibilities of touch. Privileging first and foremost the expressed understandings of how my interlocutors “appropriate the affordances of communication tools and technologies” (Harper, 2016: 351), I provide an alternative interpretation of “touch,” examining this new media primarily through its relational configurations rather than its putative mediatory qualities. Such an approach allows for a consideration of touch not based predominantly on (but simultaneously inclusive of) tactile acts, sensations, or social communication, but on the various entangled modes of relatedness and possibilities of connection involved in new media processes.

In relational and new materialist scholarship, touch has been linked more abstractly to the ways in which it implies existence and being together in the world rather than looking at touch through a primarily intercorporeal lens. Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (1997: 59–63) writes on touch in his book, The Sense of the World, within the framework of his relational philosophy that being (as existence) cannot be anything but “being-with-one-another” (Nancy, 2000: 3). Being-with implies that there is no existence in isolation, entities are always already related (Nancy, 2000: 30), therefore always “touching.” Touch in this sense does not involve an object-subject configuration (Nancy, 1997: 61) as phenomenological approaches to touch would presuppose. Paradoxically, as touch is not an ontological relationship between entities or an agential characteristic that an entity embodies, touching is always an apposition with the untouchable due to the impenetrable (relational) nature of entities.

From a quantum physics perspective applied to feminist new materialism, Karen Barad’s (2012) approach to touch is also relational, full of infinite and iterative possible and impossible configurations. Barad’s agential realist interpretation of touch posits an entangled becoming of all entities through intra-action, an idea that entities emerge through their encounters with each other, existing-with rather than a sort of self-contained existence (Barad, 2007). Touching does not actually involve touching since contact does not take place, echoing the idea that everything is always touching and untouchable (Barad, 2012: 209):

In addition to all the various iteratively reconfiguring ways that electrons, indeed all material “entities,” are entangled relations of becoming, there is also the fact that materiality “itself” is always already touched by and touching infinite configurations of possible others, other beings and times. . . the infinite touch of nothingness is threaded through all being/becoming, a tangible indeterminacy that goes to the heart of matter (Barad, 2012: 215).

Barad’s commentary on touch emphasizes the co-constitutedness of entities, the emergence through relations, and the possibilities of vast touching configurations.

In approaching “matter” of the digital, posthumanist and new materialist scholars explore human-technology phenomena by looking at how the digital and material are “entwined” and inseparable relations (Pink et al., 2016: 11), how technologies and humans do not exist as rigid boundaries (Haraway, 1991) and are mutually co-constituted (Lagerkvist, 2018: 3; Suchman, 2007), and how touch matters in digital contexts (Bozalek et al., 2021). Through digital encounters especially during pandemic times, “touching produced different ways of being and becoming-with human and nonhuman others” (Bozalek et al., 2021: 850). Within relational posthuman considerations, touch is not constrained to an idea of the physical, but enters the abstract world of affectivity, virtuality, and metaphysical existence. By delving into more abstract considerations of touch in its relational configurations, my aim is not to enter into grand-scale philosophical debates of existence, rather, I use these thoughts, saturated in connections, relations, and togetherness, touching and the untouchable, and the possible and the impossible, for something much humbler than a philosophy of being: a commentary on being-in-touch.

I now turn to the presentation of online experiences to illustrate the multiplicities of touch and the (im)possibilities of connection, followed by an analysis of what being-in-touch looks like in online experiences and its implications for the examination of new media more broadly. By basing my analysis of the dynamics of touch present in online experiences through relational frameworks (where touch is a co-constitutive relation), I am able to speak more relevantly to touch’s polysemic nature and the possibilities and impossibilities of connection afforded by this new media context.

A pandemic touches off  ⁴ online experiences

It took Airbnb, best known as the online marketplace that revolutionized accommodation through home-sharing, just 14 days to adapt their Airbnb Experiences offerings to an online format (Meharara, 2020). They transformed the experiential arm of their platform that provides locally hosted activities in cities around the world into Airbnb Online Experiences, activities now available via live Zoom sessions that people could participate in from their homes. Airbnb Online Experiences was not only a creative business solution for the platform in times when people could not move about freely, but it offered those in lockdown something new of a leisurely nature to do and an opportunity to “meet the world from home.” ⁵

The activities that participants can ⁶ choose from range from cooking classes, concerts, virtual tours, fitness and well-being sessions, hobby how-tos, and more. Using their Airbnb account, interested participants visit the online experiences page to browse and book their experience of choice at a suitable date and time in accordance with their own schedule. Whether they join a Barcelona trivia game, a Jack the Ripper tour of East London, or a laughter yoga session, the process of an online experience is relatively the same. Participants use a Zoom link provided to them by Airbnb through email to join a video call where they meet an enthusiastic host and other joining participants. In the beginning, participants introduce themselves with their names and locations and share what interested them in the experience. Then, the host and participants partake in the experience together usually involving some combination of collaborative learning or doing and social interaction. After an hour or an hour and a half, depending on the experience time limit set by the host, the video call ends and communication ceases as each participant leaves the Zoom meeting room.

Online experiences emerged as a new way for people to connect with each other online in a very specific way. In contrast to digital communication technologies which have involved, for example, representation by avatars, transferring of written information, or asynchronous video communication, online experiences enabled by video calling allow participants to be seen physically (physical cues, facial expressions, body language), be heard audibly (tone, inflection, volume), and interact with each other in the live moment; these features work to enact a sort of “death of distance” (Miller et al., 2016: 206) through new possibilities of being together online. But unlike other uses of video calling (personal, work, education), online experiences do not represent a form of connective technology that is habitual, everyday lived, or regularly incorporated into daily life as a part of ongoing communications (Harper, 2016; Madianou and Miller, 2012; Sunakawa, 2012; Watson et al., 2021) as the phenomenon is grounded in its temporality. There is no possibility for continued contact between participants who meet during an online experience once the Zoom call has ended. They do not have each other’s contact information, and it is prohibited for the host to initiate any sort of exchange, as it would violate the platform’s privacy policy. Participants may message the host pre- and postexperience through the Airbnb messaging system, but there is no link between participants to do so in a similar manner. The experiences embed all social interaction within the activity online and in the participants’ homes.

During my fieldwork, I researched online experiences through participant observation by participating in the experiences myself and observing participants in their homes undergoing an online experience (in momentary times when lockdown restrictions were lifted). I conducted interviews with both participants and hosts (via Zoom and in-home when possible) and heavily examined textual data including listings, reviews, and other online written communications. I also became an online experience host, producing and facilitating my own experience (“Find Joy in Mindful Flower Arranging”), offering me a facilitator’s perspective. This article is primarily informed by participant interviews, participant observation, and in-home observations as the topic and complexities of touch, be they communicative or tactile, emerged from participants’ social interactions and expressed perceptions. All experiences I participated in were public, although Airbnb allows people to book a private experience for a closed group of people, most commonly used as company team bonding events.

Around half of all participants joined together with someone from the same home displayed on the same screen. Participants often had prearranged their attendance in tandem with family members and friends who were separated by a physical distance, joining from different locations, and appearing as separate rectangle boxes in the Zoom call. Close to a quarter of people joined online experiences by themselves not knowing anyone prior to the experience, while the vast majority of online experience goers knew at least one other person before the video call (whether sitting next to them or on different screens). No matter if people joined with others from the same home, together from a physical distance, or on their own, every online experience ⁷ I observed had a “stranger” element to it, meaning there was always some portion of participants who were unknown to each other prior to the experience, making online experiences dynamically different from more prevalent and researched forms of interpersonal video calls between friends, family, classmates, or coworkers (Harper et al., 2019).

Each experience was an intimate grouping of people who had never been arranged together before in that specific way and never would be again. While many participants used the platform with familiars (loved ones, family, friends, couples) as a form of sustained connection, the reality was that every experience had a “stranger dynamic” to it, confirming Airbnb’s third tenant of their quality standards: “inspire conversation and create belonging. . . to have guests come as strangers and leave as friends. Share personal stories and encourage people to get to know each other” (Airbnb, 2020). This notion is complicated, as, by the very nature of online experiences, any connections made between stranger participants were severed once the experience was complete. Airbnb wants participants to interact socially to the point of knowing each other and even becoming friends, but the platform does not encourage continued communication between participants. Many times, my interlocutors expressed feeling varying degrees of social connection with other participants during the experience but were disappointed that there was no potential to continue these connections outside of the Zoom call. Toward the end of one online experience “Explore Kenyan Cuisines and Culture,” Charlotte ⁸ and Anna, sisters calling from Germany, scrambled around their kitchen to finish cooking while Jordan, who I was observing in his one-bedroom apartment in Israel, had already started eating his freshly made ugali. The two sisters were just beginning to talk about the time they visited Kenya as all three participants were now eating the meal they prepared together (separately) when. . . time was up! The host needed to end the 90-minute call. Everyone took a break from eating–their stories cut short–and waved goodbye at their computer screens as the Zoom meeting room disappeared. I watched as Jordan finished his ugali alone, never hearing the rest of Anna and Charlotte’s stories. Ultimately, the phenomenon of online experiences increases reach, allowing familiars and strangers to meet online and share activities and moments, but the experience does not encourage the ability to “keep in touch” past this, leaving the brief social juncture to exist as a remembered event for participants.

Solomon, a participant I interviewed from “Learn and Train with a Samurai from Tokyo,” spoke to his remembered version of the experience: “We were all around the world, but we still connected, like, at the same place to do the same thing at the same time.” While participants expressed disappointment with the impossibilities of connection past the experience, they also held an acute awareness of how fantastical the possibility was that they could form connections with people by doing activities together at the same time despite different geographical locations. Participants were constantly united in action and somatic experiences from different physical spaces, in their homes in front of their computers. This could be considered as a sort of “ritual communication” where participants and hosts are communicating through sharing, association, and participation (Carey, 2009: 15) in the communal experiences online (Anderson, 2020) and at-home (albeit not every day) activities (Cabalquinto, 2017; Richardson and Hjorth, 2017; Watson et al., 2021). I observed as Anat, Mai, and Ting performed the graceful motions of a traditional Japanese tea ceremony from their own separate homes, bowing at the beginning and end of the ceremony, whisking, and tasting their prepared matcha. Abby, from New York, and I simultaneously scratched lemon rinds, meditatively breathed in the citrus, and felt the oils released on our skins as we participated in an ancient Mexican stress release technique experience. Twenty-two participants from all over the world stood together for one hour of tension release with host Jean, letting out forceful staccato “ho, ho, ho”s and higher pitched “he, he, he”s as they held their bellies and concaved their chests in laughter yoga. In a way, participants and hosts are united as well through the learned processes (Hodges, 2017; Parisi, 2011) of technically navigating the experiences, touching the keyboard and trackpad, adjusting the camera angle, or corresponding with the Zoom interface, for example. Despite the diversity of each activity, every experience I observed was based on various shared somatic processes involving the body, movement, and senses.

While participants can see and hear other participants and smell and touch similar objects together, there is no possibility of physically touching others calling from different screens. Video calling may introduce feelings of “being there” by more closely replicating interactions which occur in concurrent physical spaces, but paradoxically, the approximate phenomenon “might render what is missing more salient (e.g. touch)” (Hall et al., 2021: 5). While Airbnb Online Experiences have expanded somatic modes of connection, what is most notably missing (as interlocutors insisted) is the possibility to physically touch another participant. I emphasize possibility here because my interlocutors made it very clear that, besides shaking someone’s hand (a very physically appropriate greeting of strangers before COVID-19), they would not necessarily touch a participant they had just met if they had a similar experience offline. For them, the issue was not in the actual act of touching, but the possibility of doing so, a possibility that close proximity allows, a metaphorical touch (Paterson, 2007: 162–163; Wyschogrod, 1980). They imagine that having another person physically within reach provides them with a range of deeper or continued connections. So, ironically, online experiences exist to make social connections between people connecting them through shared somatic experiences but without the element of human-to-human touch which may only occur through physical proximity. As such, online experiences present as a new media with unprecedented dynamics, offering unique configurations of people (strangers) the possibility to communicate with one another and connect over somatic activities, yet is tangled up in very complicated notions of “touch” in both communicative and tactile ways.

Recognizing possibilities lost

One thing in common with all video calls is that they end. They usually end with a non-ceremonial, abrupt jolt where either the Zoom call host ends the meeting, or each video call participant leaves the room individually. This action is not full of hugs, handshakes, or lengthy moments of shifting weight from foot to foot until the social moment is right to begin heading toward the door. In online experiences, the host initiates the goodbye process, telling participants how nice it was to be with them and asking for followers on social media. Then, there is a waterfall of “thank you”s from participants and often some waving at the camera, followed by a moment when everyone realizes they are not quite sure whose responsibility it is to end the call. Either the host ends it for everyone at the designated time or the uncomfortable and unending silent waving signals that each participant must click the “leave meeting” button. Then, the experience ends, and the participant is no longer looking at multiple rectangular frames showing others in their homes; only the Zoom platform home screen remains. They are thrust out of the experience and all that came with it with the click of a button.

The realization that this immersive experience ends and there is no option to continue it or reconnect to the new connections made after the call seems as jolting as the “leave meeting” process to some participants. Lukas, who often joins Airbnb Online Experiences with his wife Johanna for interesting date nights after they put their kids to sleep, said, “When the experience is over, and when somebody just ends the call, you just start to get a glimpse into people’s lives, and then it’s over. That leaves me hollow sometimes.” He shares that he would like to continue the conversation further or have more ways of connecting with people. Johanna seconds his feelings by sharing that when they do an “in-person” experience-like activity, members of the group all go out to a pub afterward for drinks. “Sometimes this lasts for hours,” she says. At the end of these nights, they exchange Facebook names to stay in touch. Whether they actually do stay in touch or not does not seem to concern them, but what they stress missing in online experiences is the ability to continue the connection and potentially foster deeper relationships if they want to.

To remedy this “fleeting connection” phenomenon, Johanna and Lukas suggest that maybe the host leave the Zoom room open after the experience so people can continue talking or exchange contacts. During my fieldwork, this only happened once when I observed a couple, Marilyn and Ange, during their “Mezcal & Tequila Cocktail Masterclass” experience. By the end of the experience (the participants loosened up by a few drinks), the conversation was flowing, and the host welcomed everyone to stay on the Zoom call after if they would like to continue chatting. No one seemed to take the bait, and one by one each participant trickled off the call. Ange said she could have easily stayed and continued hanging out with the other participants, but she said she would be “the weirdo” if she stayed on and asked people for their contacts to stay in touch. To her, it was not fitting with the online experience format, as there was a social awkwardness and invasiveness about asking a group of strangers this online for everyone else to see and hear. This idea is related to the identified challenge many participants told me they had about not being able to get to know participants individually during the call. Karla, an avid online experience goer, said it bothered her that there was no way to have side conversations in the online experience, for if someone is speaking in the Zoom call, everyone can hear. Even the Zoom chat settings are set by Airbnb so everyone can see everything someone writes; there is no function to message people individually. Side conversations do not translate through the screen format. Karla told me that when she did an offline supper club experience in London, she met one of her best friends through the process despite a 30-year age difference because they sat next to each other, talked together for the whole evening, and exchanged contacts so they could meet up at another time. “It’s a wholly different experience,” Karla said, referring to the fact that these things just can’t really happen in online experiences, the possibility of forging these connections and keeping in touch is simply not there.

The idea of participants recognizing such connective impossibilities is furthered as they also expressed missing connective possibilities that physical proximity affords. Every participant I interviewed was very aware that they were not and did not feel physically present with other people. This did not stop them from making connections with other participants, but the connections were different from those they could potentially make if they were physically together. Ella, whom I met during a Tai Chi experience, said that she is very sensitive to people’s energies when they are physically around her: “If there’s a person, and if I wanted to, I would want to feel him or her. There is a warmth, there is a closeness and that’s not possible.” Another participant I interviewed, Mark, said that you can only read so much body language because of the limiting edges of a screen, “but you can’t touch somebody.” Expressing a sort of “touch hunger” (Durkin et al., 2021), Solomon from the Samurai experience said, “I prefer the human contact instead of online stuff. . . We need human contact. We like physical interactions. It’s all behind the screen and it’s not the same.” Ella, Mark, and Solomon are all recognizing the impossibilities of connection while being connected, that, even if they “reach,” they can never touch.

“Reaching” is highly associated with somatic imaginings, as physically, one reaches with the aim to touch. In this sense, it represents a will for closeness, either metaphorically or physically. Reach and reachability in its communicative sense is about the ability to contact and be contacted and to attain a greater area to which communication extends. Colloquially, “I’ll reach out to them” equates to “I’ll get in touch with them.” An imagined “reaching” is linked to time as it may mean desiring something to be part of the present moment, pulling from the past, or actualizing a certain future. In the online experience, my interlocutors (like Lukas, Johanna, Ange, and Karla) long for the ability to reach out to other participants past the experiences’ expiration time and (like Ella, Mark, and Solomon) to have the possibility, if they so desire, to reach out and touch another participant physically near them. There is an imagined social potential that participants are experiencing as they desire more possibilities of touching (communicatively and tactilely), of connecting with others, beyond what is offered to them through the very makeup of online experiences. This notion is captured well by a quote from Maria: “I think for people to really connect with each other we need the touch. We need to be able to physically feel the other person.” She does not say, “we need to feel (touch)” the other person, she says, “we need to be able to.”

The grappling and making peace

Expressed sentiments from interlocutors are highly complex, as each participant in their own way works to understand the connections that they are making through the online experience. Jason and Madeline, a couple I met through an at-home scavenger hunt experience, told me in an interview that they “feel the distance, but [they] are connecting with people.” They recognize the new media format as an enabler of connecting with others like many other informants who said they did feel a social connection with other participants online. Jesse, a participant in a Greek trivia game experience living alone during pandemic time said, “I felt like there was a human connection, even though it might not have been deep. It was very fleeting, but I enjoyed it.” Jesse went on to say that in a way she felt together socially with the other participants even though “it was not like they were sitting in [her] living room.” Participants are fully aware of the distance yet are still connecting with people in altered and memorable ways.

When I asked participants how they would define an experience, the most common answer I heard was that an experience is a memorable event. In follow-up interviews, participants talked about their remembered versions of the people on the Zoom call with them, parts of the activity that shocked them or made them laugh, and the unique way that they connected with loved ones and strangers online during COVID-19 lockdowns. One participant told me, “An experience is something that sticks with you. And whatever sticks with you is when you do something that is a little bit more than you thought was possible.” During this time, many modes of social connection previously integrated into their lives became impossible with social distancing. They grappled with how to make sense of their new situations and often did so looking to technology to enable new formats of connection.

Participants were frustrated about the impossibilities posed by online experiences, not being able to keep in touch with or touch others. They expressed their lamentations for imagined modes of connection which did not only reflect their frustrations with the format of online experiences, but a more general feeling of a world shut down by a virus, cutting off many social possibilities and imposing many impossibilities on previous ways of connecting with others. Overwhelmingly, once my interlocutors realized that there were things they simply could not control, they faced the reality of these limits with a “serenity prayer-like” sentiment, accepting the things they could not change. Ella from the Tai Chi experience illustrated this when she told me, “Once you get over this feeling of disconnection, you can feel the connection you’re having right now.” Ella understands the limits that are presented to her and moves within those limits. Like in all social interactions, there are limits and impossibilities, be they online or offline. Humans work to change and develop these connections, while at the same time embracing what is available to them. As was the reality of the pandemic time, people could wish for things to be other than how the circumstances presented themselves, but many people ultimately realized that these circumstances presented particular possibilities and impossibilities out of their control, displaying the adaptable nature of people living in the social worlds they occupy.

Being-in-touch

In our present world where it is common for people to walk around with the potential of Internet usage in their pockets, our daily lives are integrated with the constant ability to communicate with others (Bakardjieva, 2005) to create and sustain connections with people (Wilson and Peterson, 2002), and to be able to do so without being physically co-present (Baym, 2015). As such, “losing touch” as a phenomenon in its now ancient form becomes less possible and rarer. Keeping in touch has transformed into an intentional desire to sustain a connection with someone, not dependent on physical distance (Christensen, 2009). Losing touch is no longer a result of technological inabilities or circumstantial reasons, as social communication technologies have steadily developed to increase humans’ ability to reach others and be reached. Yet, on the contrary, for online experiences, losing touch is a result of technological dynamics and the nature of the encounter resonating with times past when communication technologies were limited in their ability to sustain a permanent connection. Although we are in a more connected world, full of almost always having the potential to reach out to one another, online experiences take us back to momentary connections existing in memory and humans surrendering recurring connections to serendipitous fate. This is where the tension lies in online experiences, while communication technologies over time have increased connective abilities, even replicating elements of offline interpersonal communication to advance extents, the enhanced possibilities of connection are simultaneously paired with the perceived inabilities of connection, especially in a period of no-touch (physical) with wide range ways to keep in touch (communicatively). It would seem that we are in a more in-touch world but with a less in-touch experience.

Yet, while there are many ways possibilities of touch are nonexistent in online experiences, participants are in many ways still “in touch,” as touch lies at the heart of connective potential, deeply entangled in possibilities and impossibilities. Being-in-touch, inspired by relational considerations of touch, is a posthumanist concept that implies multiple modes of connectedness. The two emerging themes that I incorporate from a relational consideration of touching (as established at the article’s theoretical outset) are (1) everything always being plural or related in infinite configurative ways and (2) the impossibilities implied through the possibilities of connections.

Regarding the former, to be in touch implies a multiplicity, as touch involves an interaction that cannot be singular. In the communicative sense of touch, to “keep in touch,” a child sending their parent a letter while stationed overseas, two best friends having a phone call to catch up on the latest news, or groups connecting online for an online experience, cannot exist as individuals in isolation. Everyone and everything are always in a state of connectedness. Nancy (1991) provides us an example of passengers on a train who are unlinked in that they are an unorganized group but also linked in that they are all on the train together; they are “a relation without a relation” (p. 7). Online experiences are groups of unorganized organized people. They are related in many ways such as being interested in the same sort of activity or experience, living through COVID-19 lockdowns at home, performing activities together and interacting socially, essentially becoming a group in a mode of connection enabled and cut short by Zoom. They are united in the many somatic ways of the online experience (including a tactile relationship with technology) but not through proximity or physical touch with one another. But as described, being-in-touch is not about the actual touching, rather, it is captured by the relational connectedness in its many possible and impossible forms.

As for the second theme, my interlocutors would most likely align with the notion that touch is tainted by the untouchable. They echo the notion that “new media constantly attains new possibilities” (Miller et al., 2016: 206) by being fully aware that the online experience is offering them a new mode of social connection making it possible to participate and interact with both loved ones and strangers from a physical distance and experience something new and memorable during the pandemic. Yet, as seen through their many comments and the nature of the temporal digital moment, they are also equally aware of the possibilities of connection inaccessible to them such as sustained contact and physical proximity. This complexity reflects Barad’s proposition of “infinite configurations of possible others,” the possible and the impossible are wrapped into one another, what I have referred to as (im)possibility. Nancy’s touch as an ontological condition of being-with and Barad’s infinite configurations of touch play out in online experiences as they are embodied in the concept of being-in-touch. With this term, I do not seek a universal philosophical truth, rather, I bring the term being-in-touch into understandings of connectedness for future use in the examination of relations, not limited to the digital but analytic possibilities both outside of and beyond it. Emerging through and applied to my research of online experiences, being-in-touch serves to describe ontological and epistemological ways of relating. My interlocutors in the online experience navigate being-in-touch in its complex ways, troubled through its impossible connective processes yet simultaneously accepted through its enabling and memorable features.

The data-driven implications of this article reveal the need to examine the complexities of emergent new media like online experiences that complicate or flow contrary to seemingly forward-moving trends of “touch” in communication technologies (like further enhancing sustained social contact or increasingly replicating “in-person” communication somatically). By representing people’s experiences of touch (in this case recognitions of connective [im]possibilities) and presenting dynamics of new media through relational frameworks, we are able to explore touch’s polysemic nature and the multiplicities of connection afforded by new contexts. On a grander scale, what emerges most saliently through this research is a new way of looking at touch (being-in-touch) as (plural) relatedness immersed with endless (im)possibilities of connection. Connections are a helpful way to explore relations (Appel, 2021) and being-in-touch explores the possibilities of those connections. Whether touching communicatively or tactilely, as this article has topically proposed, or in further reaching theoretical or metaphysical considerations, touch is heavily embedded in various modes of connecting, rich in (im)possibility.