Touch implies:
Physical, embodied, material, corporeal,
Sensual, intimate, pleasurable, arousing, erotic, vulnerable, painful (subjectivity)
Experience, immediacy, authenticity, certainty, reality (objectivity)
Proximity, contact, directness, situatedness, immersion, commonality
Feeling, touching and being touched, who/what, being in touch
Care, engagement, accountability
“COVID-19 – like prior pandemics – has impacted and disorganized our understandings of the body, the boundaries of public/private, intimacy, sex, risk, and the distribution of vulnerability and care.“
The breakdown of the definition of touch seems to imply that machines can perform these functions. As this tactile realm moves into cyberspace, touch can be separated by distance. The touch experience becomes something that can be stored, transmitted and synthesized by a computer.
In the film Blade Runner, Joe as a hologram surrounds K, desperately trying to bond with him. Even as a high-tech vehicle with absolute intelligence and senses, specialized algorithms, and a coded language for every tactile sensation, real touch is still a luxury. Finally she finds a prostitute, she enters the prostitute's body, and then becomes one with K.
Some people enjoy the sensation.
Can touch be understood as feeling? Crush is a feeling of electric shock. A vibration of the heart that can have nothing to do with direct contact.
In the same way, the sensation of electric shock can come from musical/movie/literary resonance.
I don't know when the touch screen symbolized the progress of technology and The Times: we wanted bigger and bigger, clearer and more agile, even with vibration touch screen. Touch symbolizes a desire, a conquest.