Dr. David Parisi is an associate professor of emerging media in the Department of Communication who frequently teaches graduate courses including: Social Media; Videogames and Visual Culture; and Media, Communication, and Technocultures.
He has given presentations on his work at conferences across the world including the Netherlands, Norway, Austria, Germany, Italy, Australia, Japan, and Canada. His presentation on “The Algorithms of Immediate Contact” can be viewed online, and he has also been featured in The Wall Street Journal and on the podcast, Stroke of Genius.
His research explores touching with digital technologies, and he recently published a book related to this topic, Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing. Dr. Parisi initially became interested in touch communication, or haptic feedback, growing up playing video games and witnessing the change that occurred in the 1990s when spinning motors were put inside controllers to make them shake and vibrate in players’ hands as games started sending messages using touch. Since the 1990s, the motors used to provide haptic feedback have grown in complexity and ubiquity, and Dr. Parisi has found that Haptic Media Studies provides an important framework for understanding how media technologies communicate with us through touch.
To learn more about Dr. Parisi and his research, visit his faculty profile and Academia pages.