click and drag

I'm wondering about what is happening to our sense of the haptic (that sensuous capacity for at touching that is also an act of grasping and seizing) under the regime of the click and drag interface.

It has made me want to write the response to the recent Hollywood upper-middle class panic attack atrocity Firewall and my own script would be named CURSOR . You know the plot, happy white upper middle class family with subzero stainless appliances is beset by terrorist blackmailer identity thieves who infect happy white upper middle class family's digital home with a viral Tourette's syndrome. The HDTV and the computerized appliances all display F##$ YOU as a morning greeting and the IPOD driven stereo sends out wave after wave of songs laced with obscenities. Family falls apart, children are kicked out of private school for cursing, wife pulls a muscle in Pilates class cursing her instructor out, husband's work computer confiscated for obscenity.

What does it mean that our ideas of grasping and touching has become metaphorized as click and drag? Internet porn may be once again at the forefront of making this particular kind of "interface" with the surface of the other.