A few years ago, I attended a talk about the senses. I learned that there is widespread disagreement about how many there actually are. Some of the disagreements are cultural, some scientific. There are arguments for 5 or 6 or 20 or even more of them. I’ve been thinking about that talk and wondering whether the number of senses should be rounded down, rather than up, because aren’t they all, ultimately, to do with touch? Our environment literally touches us: light bounces into our eyes, sound hits our eardrum and so on. We all know what someone means if they say a smell knocked them senseless – again, it’s touch that is emphasized…
One of my aims in coming here was to study further the differences in eye movement between paper and screen reading. I’ve been noticing this in myself for a while already – my eyes move differently when I’m at a computer, than if I am reading a printed page or book. Whilst at the library, I have watched young people studying at their laptops and old men reading the free newspapers: the way they use their eyes clearly differs too. What I hadn’t previously thought about however, is the effect of the digital world on our sense of touch and how changes to do with looking and seeing are actually bound up in this. This is all neatly summarized in a commonplace word that I noticed as if for the first time today: touchscreen. Touch. Screen. Touchscreen. I can’t believe I never thought about this before!
