UC Berkeley

“Touchscreen Media: The Touch and User-Spectators in Twenty-First Century China” examines the global dissemination of touchscreen media and their radical transformation of our dynamic interactions with media objects. Through the lens of everyday media practices in contemporary China, this dissertation investigates changes in media and sensory perception caused by the touchscreen as a new viewing technology and platform. This dissertation theorizes the emergence of the touchscreen and its mobilization of touch by examining three hand gestures: scrolling/swiping, pinching-spreading, and bullet-titling/typing. The emphasis on hand movements offers a corrective to the ocular-centric conception of the screen as an optical apparatus dominating the studies of modern western visual cultures. This dissertation also proposes a reconceptualization of the spectator as the user-spectator, a subject who comes into being in their coevolution with media devices enhanced by touch technology. This reconceptualization thus addresses the “embodied” spectator as a technological subject who reshapes and is reshaped by digital tactility, departing from phenomenological approaches that, though claiming to recuperate other suppressed senses, reduce embodiment to “embodied vision,” in which the sense of touch is approached through the model of synaesthesia. This dissertation responds to the urgent need to adapt theories of media apparatus and spectatorship to new technologies and practices of kinesthetic communication.