This book grows from my deep fascination with the human body in all its elasticity, creativity, and diversity. It found its feet in the ballet classes I took as a child, its eyes through the viewfinder of my compact camera, its ears from mixtapes on my Walkman, and its rhythms from the life pulsing on city sidewalks. To me, how our fingers skip and tap across our smartphones is as marvelous as how they dance across piano keys. And tap they do: the average user touches their phone more than 2,600 times a day.​

 

From our romances to our finances, so much of life now unfolds through digital interfaces. The latest technologies—self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, deepfakes—seem torn from the pages of science fiction, raising urgent questions about what it means to live fully human lives. But you only need to look around to see how much our bodies continue to matter.​

 

The Body Digital traces the history of how bodies and technologies have grown together, from eyeglasses to player pianos to computers and beyond. Each invention has changed not only how we see, hear, and move but also how we imagine the world and our place within it. By uncovering these hidden histories, the book shows how they continue to shape our expectations today—and how they might help us imagine futures where technology supports creativity rather than erasing it.​

 

Our bodies are living interfaces between our minds and our world. Designing that interface is a choice, and so is the world we are always building. My hope is that The Body Digital expands those choices.