Do digital hugs work? Re-embodying our social lives online with digital tact.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to social restrictions that often prevented us from hugging the ones we love. This absence helped some realize just how important these interactions are to our sense of care and connection. Many turned to digitally mediated social interactions to address these absences, but often unsatisfactorily. Some theorists might blame this on the disembodied character of our digital spaces, e.g., that interpersonal touch is excluded from our lives online. However, others continued to find care and connection in their digitally mediated interactions despite not being able to touch. Inspired by such contrasting cases, we ask if 'digital hugs' can work? We use the Mixed Reality Interaction Matrix to examine hugging as a social practice. This leads us to several claims about the nature of our embodied social interactions and their digital mediation: (1) all social interaction is mediated; (2) all virtual experiences are embodied; (3) technology has become richer and more supportive of embodiment; and (4) expertise plays a role. These claims help make the case that quality social connections online are substantially dependent upon the dynamic skilful resourcing of multiple mediating components, what we term digital tact. By introducing and developing this concept, we hope to contribute to a better understanding of our digital embodied sociality and the possibilities for caring connections online.

Corrigendum: Bringing forth within: Enhabiting at the intersection between enaction and ecological psychology.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01348.].

Corrigendum: The pandemic experience survey II: A second corpus of subjective reports of life under social restrictions during COVID-19 in the UK, Japan, and Mexico.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.913096.].

Bringing Forth Within: Enhabiting at the Intersection Between Enaction and Ecological Psychology.

Baggs and Chemero (2018) propose that certain tensions between enaction and ecological psychology arise due different interpretations about what is meant by the "environment." In the enactive approach the emphasis is on the umwelt, which describes the environment as the "meaningful, lived surroundings of a given individual." The ecological approach, on the other hand, emphasises what they refer to as the habitat "the environment as a set of resources for a typical, or ideal, member of a species." By making this distinction, these authors claim they are able to retain the best of both the ecological and the enactive approaches. Herein I propose an account of the individuation of habits that straddles this distinction, what I call a compatabilist account. This is done in two parts. The first part teases out a host of compatibilities that exist between the enactive account as developed by Di Paolo et al. (2017) and the skilled intentionality framework as developed by Bruineberg and Rietveld (2014) and Rietveld and Kiverstein (2014). In part two these compatibilities are brought together with the that these compatibilities can be brought together with the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon to develop the notion of enhabiting. Enhabiting describes a set of ongoing processes by which an umwelt emerges from and is reproduced within the relationship between an embodied subject and their habitat. Thus, enhabiting points toward a point of intersection between enaction and ecological psychology. To enhabit is bring forth (to enact), within (to inhabit).

Coenhabiting Interpersonal Inter-Identities in Recurrent Social Interaction.

We propose a view of identity beyond the individual in what we call interpersonal inter-identities (IIIs). Within this approach, IIIs comprise collections of entangled stabilities that emerge in recurrent social interaction and manifest for those who instantiate them as relatively invariant though ever-evolving patterns of being (or more accurately, becoming) together. Herein, we consider the processes responsible for the emergence of these IIIs from the perspective of an enactive cognitive science. Our proposal hinges primarily on the development of two related notions: enhabiting and coenhabiting. First, we introduce the notion of enhabiting, a set of processes at the individual level whereby structural interdependencies stabilize and thereafter undergird the habits, networks of habits, and personal identities through which we make sense of our experience. Articulating this position we lean on the notion of a tendency toward an optimal grip, though offering it a developmental framing, whereby iterative states of selective openness help realize relatively stable autonomous personal identities with their own norms of self-regulation. We then extend many of the notions found applicable here to an account of social coenhabiting, in particular, we introduce the notion of tending toward a co-optimal grip as central to the development of social habits, networks of habits, and ultimately IIIs. Such structures, we propose, also emerge as autonomous structures with their own norms of self-regulation. We wind down our account with some reflections on the implications of these structures outside of the interactions wherein they come into being and offer some thoughts about the complex animations of the individual embodied subjects that instantiate them.