Techniques of the Tactile Body: A Cultural Phenomenology of Infants and Mobile Touchscreens

Abstract

A key dimension of young children’s mobile media engagement and play centres on their embodied relations, and how these are shaped with and through the interfaces, materiality and mobility of haptic media. This article explores these embodied dimensions of young children’s mobile media use, drawing on research from (1) ethnographic observation of young children’s play practices in family homes, (2) analysis of videos of young children’s tactile media interaction shared on YouTube and (3) analysis of user interface (UI) and mobile app developer literature, such as the ‘Event Handling Guide for iOS’, which encodes touchscreen interaction through the design constraints and possibilities of gest..