We live in digital culture that elevates sight and downgrades touch. This cultural bias has deep philosophical roots that go all the way to Plato. Aristotle disagreed, pronouncing touch the most universal and intelligent of the senses, but ultimately lost the argument. There is no going back from our digital culture but by making space in our life for offline activities, and developments in haptotechnology, we can hope to bridge the gap between virtual and embodied experience, writes Richard Kearney.

Her, the sci-fi movie by Spike Jonze, a man falls madly in love with his Operating System. So madly that he can think of nothing else and becomes insanely jealous when he discovers that she (called OS) is also flirting with a few hundred other subscribers. Eventually OS feels so badly for him that she decides to supplement her digital persona with a real body by sending a surrogate lover in her name. But the love scene fails miserably because while the man touches the embodied lover, he hears the virtual signals of OS in his ears and cannot reconcile the two. The split between digital absence and tactile presence is too much to bear. The man loses touch with himself as an incarnate person and can only relate to the virtual chimera. He freezes up.