Digital Pleasures — The Techno Social

In November 2020 the digital pleasure collective when live with a panel at The Australian Sociological Association’s virtual conference. The panel abstract is below - and more importantly, as is a recording of our discussion. Features (in speaking order) : Drs. Naomi Smith (Federation University), Monica Barratt (RMIT), Alexia Maddox (Deakin) and Jenny Davis (ANU).

This panel discusses how pleasure, as an embodied experience, combines with digital technologies through products which elicit a desired physiological response. This class of products, which we refer to as resonant media, generates pleasure through carefully crafted stimuli, delivered in digital form. The panel will consider ASMR, through which content creators evoke that “tingly” sensation, Cam models and the evocation of sensual pleasure, alongside binaural beats and their association with digital drugs.

We position digital pleasures through the ways in which technology expands sensory experiences. We will discuss the capacity of resonant media to entwine with and expand the biological capacities of the body, such that technologically mediated interactions can be warm, sensuous embodied, and close. Through exploring the affordances of the technologies that facilitate and encourage pleasure, the panel will highlight how pleasure is being (re)made in the ‘now’ normal. Pleasure for pleasure’s sake is not only personally sustaining, but should be a serious object of sociological examination in our changed world.

The COVID-19 pivot

As the world grapples with COVID-19, staying at home has meant an increased reliance on screens and mediation as sites of pleasure and connection. Warm visceralities combine with cold-coded tools to produce pleasurable sensations.
Content creators have capitalised on this entanglement to create products and services that stimulate pleasure by design. Understanding how these products work, for whom, and under what circumstances will not only illuminate an emergent cultural practice, but also re-centre bodies in the study of human-technology interaction.
This reading resists the framing of technology as individualising, deficient and distancing. Instead we argue that the intensification of online activity has not left the body behind. Not only is pleasure embodied, but so is our engagement with technology.
The panel will consider how focusing on pleasure as a source of well-being and meaning in a socially distanced world also points to ways in which we can be ‘well’ outside of the wellness model advanced by neoliberalised workplaces. Now more than ever it is important to decouple pleasure from commodified concepts of wellness and understand how people experience pleasure and connection, in mediated digital contexts.