Rachel Plotnick’s recent work centers on no-contact and touchless technologies which surged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Scholars have recently argued that the “luxury” of not-touching has become a “necessity,” which has precipitated the development of new interfaces that employ voice, gesture, and sight rather than hand operation. Furthermore, a spate of conversational bots, listening technologies, and biometric identification systems have cropped up to take the place of more traditional touch inputs, introducing new algorithmic logics and bodily orientations into such interactions. Plotnick will situate the current conversation around touchlessness within a longer historical context while addressing pressing ethical considerations.

Rachel Plotnick is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in The Media School at Indiana University Bloomington. She received her PhD from the Media, Technology and Society program in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. Her research agenda examines human-machine relations, particularly as they relate to interfaces. Plotnick’s book, Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic and the Politics of Pushing, is published by The MIT Press. Her research is also featured in Technology and Culture, New Media and Society, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Media, Culture and Society and others.