Digital orientations: “Ways of the hand” and practical knowing in media uses and other manual activities

This article is concerned with a particular aspect of the relationship between media and mobility. The author draws attention to what he calls the “doubly digital” quality of contemporary media—pointing to the intimate connection between movements through media settings (such as online environments) and movements of the fingers or digits on keyboards, keypads, touch-screens, and so on. His main interest is in mobile, generative ways of the hand that is at home with communication technologies, and in opening up an investigation of media uses as manual activities. In exploring these mobile, generative ways, he also reflects on a range of other manual activities that are apparently unrelated to media use—venturing into the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, and anthropology to discuss phenomenological perspectives on practices of typing, organ and piano playing, and plank sawing. Out of his exploration emerges a focus on embodied, sensuous, practical knowing, and on matters of orientation and habitation (with the author advocating a distinctive nonrepresentational, non-media-centric approach for future studies of media use in everyday life).