More than a century ago, the British writer E. M. Forster published a parable about the solitary endgame of technological progress. In his story, “The Machine Stops,” the humans of the far future live underground in isolated cells, with all of life mediated through an omnipotent computer—the Machine. In this hive-like complex, Forster writes, “people never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete.” Contact with others is controlled through buttons in one’s cell, which activate Forster’s prescient vision of video calling. He describes how one inhabitant’s room, “though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.”
We haven’t climbed inside Forster’s Machine just yet, but Covid-19 and the necessary strategies to contain it have certainly narrowed the sensuous aspects of our lives. Touch—contagion’s fast lane—has become the most ominous of the five senses. Outside the precious seal of the home, every touch must be considered carefully: Do I pick up the basket in the grocery store or stagger quickly around, cradling my canned goods as though they’re a restless baby? Yet we also miss touch’s consolations, all those gentle moments of physical contact. We remember the last person we hugged, unthinkingly, outside a bar or leaving a party, drawn together into unexpected intimacy.
With touch now taboo, other senses are being drafted in to compensate. Visual experiences fill in for tactile ones. Early on in the pandemic, the adult site PornHub made its premium content free for locked-down Italians. The business of porn has always been to convert touch into an audiovisual event, commodifying it in the process. This alchemical conversion is a defining feature of the culture of self-isolation.
In the ideal, computer-modeled lockdown, all touches between different households have been paused. Perhaps what we need in this moment, then, is an archive as capacious as PornHub of touching old footage from film and TV—the Love Actually airport scene, the carnival in Grease, Chandler jumping into Joey’s arms. Any housebound developers with time on their sanitized hands might consider working on an aggregator for platonic affection. PornHug? ForlornHub? Thank you, I’ll be here for the foreseeable future.
In the Covid era, “keeping in touch” is the new touching. There was an arcane time when I said the word “zoom” out loud about once a year, but those days aren’t now. When I teach a virtual class or join a virtual faculty meeting, I brace myself for the almost complete sensory deprivation of the first few Zoom seconds. I’m getting to know that lull, that loud silence of the default muting, before people’s audio feeds kick in, one by one. We wave hello and goodbye—shy gestures that reveal our uncertainty about where we are in space. A wave was developed to attract attention at a distance, and yet, via the webcam, we’re in each other’s faces. So are we far apart or intensely close? The dizzying answer is: both.
For practical reasons, Zoom’s conference settings turn speech into a spectacle. In Active Speaker mode, the person talking floods the visual field; the screen becomes a stage for our temporary overlord. If you choose Gallery Mode, the speaker’s hutch is framed in glowing chartreuse. I’m reminded of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, in which the group of stranded schoolchildren, literally isolated on a desert island, devise the system of the conch to determine who can speak in meetings. Only the boy holding the shell may make a declaration.
All this seeing and being seen is producing a new kind of fatigue. It’s tiring to be so relentlessly spectacular. Zoom offers some solutions to this visual overload. Virtual backgrounds, which are meant to limit the power of our digital sight, create a shield against the intrusion of professional life into private spaces. Once you’ve loaded up your backdrop, you exist for others in a kind of non-place, somewhere that’s neither your room nor their room. And to give a full retreat into public-privacy, there is the “stop video” option, so that a seminar becomes a conversation between stern movie credits or petrified profile pictures. They say that hearing is the last sense to go.
There’s both light relief and serious privacy to be gained from these artificial backdrops, but they do make me think a little uneasily about the philosopher John Berger’s description of zoos in his essay “Why Look at Animals?” Berger notes how everything in an animal’s enclosure becomes a token of itself. The space and air inside the cage are merely tokens of space and air, stripped of their constituting qualities of expansiveness and freedom. The animals live in an illusory world of natural emblems, rather than nature: “painted prairies or painted rock pools … the dead branches of a tree for monkeys, artificial rocks for bears.” For the spectator, Berger writes, these tokens “are like theater props.”
Berger emphasizes that comparing any human confinement to a zoo can lead to lazy thinking, and our rational, responsible, collective effort to self-isolate is clearly not the same thing as imprisonment. But Berger’s essay can make us think more joyfully about how we’re improvising social life in a suddenly audiovisual world. With dinner parties temporarily shut down, we’ve lost the ability to taste and smell one another’s hospitality. The rituals are spliced; sight and sound survive, but your virtual companions have moules frites while you have butter-bean casserole. We can’t always source the same food, and we definitely can’t eat from the same dish. We can’t clink glasses. And so we turn to visual tokens, in these times, to create cozy spectacles for friends and family. We make sure our own drinks are on display. We can’t really share the same candlelight, but an on-screen candle becomes a cold cue for social warmth. A vase of flowers moves from an element of shared ambience to an odorless symbol of hospitality. This is the theater of togetherness, but like all good theater it broadcasts real emotion.
In the absence of our full sensory toolkit, we’re having to coax one another into this emergency synesthesia, where sound and sight do the work of the other, more intimate senses. Making all this up as we go, we’re learning to modulate our voices to offer the solace that we would normally provide with our bodies. Life without touch raises bizarre questions: What facial expressions transmit the comfort of a parental hand on the brow? What remote body language can register on the other side of the screen as a hug? As touch retreats, we need distant cues for connection.
It’s significant that Facebook’s new pandemic-themed Reaction, rolled out in late April, features the yellow smiley squeezing a heart to its face-bosom. The “hug” reaction is the only one of these emoji to represent touch. The classic blue thumbs-up is based on a gesture that, like waving, is meant to communicate information remotely. But now that more or less everything is remote, emoji too are turning tactile. In the mission to make touch visible, it’s all hands on deck.
The only life jacket in this audiovisual deluge is the idea of its temporariness. We can’t live forever on sight and sound alone. With so much touch curtailed, many of us are sinking our crazed fists into plump mounds of sourdough. Animals in their artificial cages, as Berger observes, tend “to bundle towards the edge of it. (Beyond its edges there may be real space.)” For us, “real space” is where life is shared through as many senses as we have available to us, not only the civically sanctioned ones. And so we bundle to the edges of our confinements, waiting to reclaim this lost reality. For those living in neighborhoods, the window doubles as another important screen. In our windows we leave messages for neighbors, teddy bears for passing, friendless children. We stand on balconies and in doorways and cheer the heroism of health care workers (as well as wail for their lack of protections). We move instinctively, through any routes still safely open to us, toward one another.
In Lord of the Flies, Ralph and Piggy discover the conch shell lying in the weeds of a lagoon. Ralph digs it up, and then Golding writes this weird sentence: “Now the shell was no longer a thing seen but not to be touched, Ralph too became excited.” Imagine our collective, schoolchild delirium when we can add back other senses to sight, when social life is no longer “a thing seen but not to be touched.”
Photograph: Antoine Rouleau/Getty Images; Facebook