Digitality as Tactility. McLuhan, the Computer and the Button

Marshall McLuhan’s media theory is not concerned with a detailed consideration of the technical workings of digital media. The concept of tactility, though, described by McLuhan as the interplay of senses and a comprehensive translation of experience and knowledge, holds the possibility of a new approach to analyzing digital media from a historical and systematic perspective. Digitality can be thought of as one historically determinable implementation of the general principle of tactility. Beside its universality and capacity for representing and integrating earlier media, the digital computer’s tactile character manifests itself in the technique and gesture of pressing a button. An indispensable operating element of digital devices, the button functions as the machine’s equivalent to the tactile mediations effected by hand and speech; materializing the paradigmatic and syntagmatic logic of the Symbolic, it is a technology of articulation.