Hello, fantastic, awesome humans.
It's Jonathan Fields coming to you with today's Good Life project update, where we blend a couple of different segments together, generally a riff and a good life science update, which is what we've got on Tapview today.
In our riff, I'll be talking about something that I call the touch economy.
I have no idea if that phrase has ever been used before, but it's just kind of the phrase that I use to describe our intrinsic need to be tactile in the world.
And it's something that I think we're coming back to.
We're also diving into some pretty fascinating research, and that is research about how listening versus seeing actually allows us to pick up emotion.
Really excited to share these riffs and science updates with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
And we're back with today's riff.
I want to talk to you about this thing that I call the touch economy.
And this has been on my mind for years now.
We see so much of the world moving into the space of being digital.
You know, it's funny.
We were out of the city the other weekend, and we're hanging out at a coffee shop, and on a table in the coffee shop, there was this old rotary phone.
And I'm hanging out with, it was me, my wife, and my 16 year old daughter.
And we look at the phone, and we're kind of trying to describe how the phone worked to my daughter, which is like this kind of foreign, bizarre thing.
And it becomes pretty, pretty clear that there's a dial, and you put your finger in the little hole and you spin it around and there are little kind of tap, tap, tap clicks that happen.
And for those of you who are a similar age as I am, I'm 51 or somewhere in the range or who are exposed to rotary phones, you may have, when you were a kid, hit a point where a parent may have gotten a little bothered by the amount of phone calls, taking up the one phone in the house and put a classic phone lock, which was like a little nub that stuck out so you couldn't rotate the dial.
And then you learn that if you tapped the little thing that sat under the handset, you could click off the numbers of a telephone number and secretly call your friends and bypass that high level gadgetry that was designed to stop you from calling.
The bigger point being, we grew up, many of us, in a world that was highly tactile.