Thus, manipulation and interaction form a strand of persuasive possibility that helps structure a user’s experience within the STM, and also engagement with other technologies whose dynamics may operate similarly.
The increased engagement encouraged by the operating dynamics of the STM resonates with the last type of human computer interaction, “flow,” further explaining how rhetorical experience with the STM is structured. As mentioned above, flow tends to include participation from both sides so that neither computer nor user occupies the positions of “sender” or “receiver.” “Flow” may most accurately describe how the human user interacts with the screen and microscope apparatus because users engage in repeated interactions as they manipulate the sample and the image—interactions that build on responses from the sample, user, and image, and also take on a playful quality. Researchers’ descriptions of using the STM echo the characterization of flow. Scientist Gimzewski and artist Victoria Vesna explain in a collaborative article, “through images constructed from feeling atoms with an STM, an unconscious connection to the atomic world quickly becomes automatic to researchers who spend long periods of time in front of their STMs. This inescapable reaction is much like driving a car—hand, foot, eye and machine coordination becomes automated” (11). In describing the experience of using an STM to someone who has never used the microscope, one scientist I interviewed responded by making an explicit link to computer games:
Well, it’s kind of like a late-seventies video game . . . . You’re looking at a computer screen and you see little blobs on the screen which correspond to, you know, typically will correspond to a single atom or molecule on the surface that you’re looking at, and you know, on good days you can manipulate these atoms or molecules, and then it becomes a lot more like a video game because you actually—most software interfaces are mouse based. If you want to manipulate something, that involves usually moving the mouse and clicking and then moving it somewhere else and clicking again. So that’s almost like, you know, Ms. Pac Man or something like that . . . . So it can be quite fun.47
Another respondent answered, “it’s hypnotic, I would say . . . . You go in and you’re exploring a part of the world that nobody has seen because of that scale and you often don’t know what you’re gonna find and you usually don’t understand what you’re seeing.”48 Other scientists, such as Eigler, remark on the playful qualities of exploration with the STM and also on some of the excitement they feel as they manipulate atoms (Eigler, “From the Bottom Up” 425; also see Chapter 4). For these users, the hypnotic, game-like effects of using the STM may not only influence their perceptions of what they are doing (e.g., making STM use more “fun”), but also how the researchers perceive themselves and the instrument. As N. Katherine Hayles explains about her experience with virtual reality:
I can attest to the disorienting, exhilarating effect of the feeling that subjectivity is dispersed throughout the cybernetic circuit. In these systems, the user learns, kinesthetically and proprioceptively, that the relevant boundaries for interaction are defined less by the skin than by the feedback loops connecting body and simulation in a technobio-integrated circuit. (How We Became Posthuman 27)
Whether or not users experience feedback loops, as Hayles describes, or a merging with the machine, Hayles’s comment shows how users may attune themselves to operating beyond the confines of what is considered the boundary of the body and, in a transformative, prosthetic relation, merge or fuse—physically and mentally—amidst the dynamic that constitutes the interaction. The habits of interaction learned while using the STM may be longer lasting; as Hayles comments, while learning how to interact in a virtual reality simulation, “the neural configuration of the user’s brain experiences changes, some of which can be long-lasting. The computer molds the human even as the human builds the computer” (How We Became Posthuman 27; see also Hayles, How We Think, Chapter 4). The interaction, the “flow,” may then create longer-lasting patterns and, as with Hayles, above, Manovich and others have pointed out that the habituated patterns may also affect how the user responds to other interactive situations and technologies beyond the STM (136). As Manovich comments, for example: “As we work with software and use the operations embedded in it, these operations become part of how we understand ourselves, others, and the world” (136).
Indeed, one benefit of studying specific interaction dynamics that reach beyond the particular instrument, such as electron tunneling, movement in x, y, and z directions, and GUI use, is to see how the dynamics that structure STM interactions may influence trends in instrument use, such as the various uses of computer media—and through computer media, other scientific and medical visualization technologies. The fact that interaction dynamics such as rastering and GUI are also common to other technologies supports the claim that they may indeed become habituated interactions, so that one expects to manipulate, to interact with atoms, much like one expects to interact with an onscreen digital image. The dynamics thus import their own rhetorical power to the use of visualization technologies of which the dynamics are a part. It is no surprise, perhaps, given the presence of dynamics such as electron tunneling, movement in x, y, and z directions, and GUI use, that the STM includes such an emphasis on manipulability and interaction, but what is unique is how these operating dynamics combine to help create the particular space of flow in which users are persuaded of the manipulable, almost tangible, atom. The coordinated operating dynamics encourage specific interactions from image viewers in order to read them, as Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 discuss. The dynamics also affect the productions of the STM in ways that become important to understanding the rhetorical possibilities and changing discourses of nanotechnology in which atoms become tangible and able to be manipulated.
Interaction and Envisioning: Images, Information, and Atoms
In addition to the effects on the user discussed above, the combined dynamics of electron tunneling, movement in x, y, and z directions, and GUI use that help constitute the STM also help shape its productions, such as the image produced by the STM, the concept of information implied in this process, and nanoscale phenomena—such as atoms—that become visible through the imaged information. The following sketches trace the effects of the dynamics described above through productions of the STM in order to elaborate on what is persuasive about the STM, and to show the significance of the dynamic constitution of the STM. The following discussion also articulates aspects of the space of visibility created by STM use, and suggests how STM dynamics may affect our understanding of the nanoscale and of our world, as well as how we may have also changed in order to see atoms and molecules.
Imaging Interaction: The STM Image
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