exploration of how the rhetorics of engagement function in visuals such as interfaces helps make interfaces visible as rhetorical sites that structure interaction. Carnegie’s focus on modes of participatory interaction further articulates details of how the user becomes involved in the operating dynamics of an instrument.
Porter’s description of digital composition includes interaction as one element that writers in electronic spaces need to consider in their delivery decisions, acknowledging that “different types of computer interfaces and spaces enable different forms of engagement” (“Recovering” 217). Porter suggests that interaction forms a significant part of productive rhetoric for writers in digital spaces, especially with attention paid to how participation and procedure may be linked. Like Carnegie and Porter, Bogost develops a structural analysis of the rhetorical components of interaction, emphasizing the procedural rhetoric of interactivity in the context of videogames. Bogost argues that interactivity can be understood in relation to the Aristotelian enthymeme, in that videogame players supply the warrant as they play (43). Interaction allows the player to proceed through the content, or “argument,” of the game in ways that are mental, but also are embodied—such as using the joystick or pressing keystrokes to respond. Bogost also analyzes the procedures of computer games to interpret messages created by how computer games structure narratives according to user responses. While Bogost does not analyze the production processes of procedural rhetorics per se, his approach of considering the structuring of interactivity as rhetorical—and involving the user as well as elements of what the user engages with—is one applicable to production practices such as those used to create interfaces.
The concept of affordances presents one way to focus on what interactions may be most significant, and as such, most significant for understanding the rhetorics of procedural and participatory components of interaction. Carolyn Miller argues for understanding parallels between rhetoric and technology (particularly communication technologies) through the idea of affordances, quoting psychologist James Gibson’s formulation of affordances as what an environment “provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (Gibson 127). In Miller’s view, affordances help explain how technology, like rhetoric, can lead users toward some possibilities, and away from others. Miller argues for how affordances of communication technologies function:
[A]ffordances take the form not of material properties or ecological niches [as they do for physical environments like an animal’s habitat] but rather properties of information and interaction that can be put to particular cognitive and communicative uses. Thus a technological affordance, or a suite of affordances, is directional, it appeals to us, by making some forms of communicative interaction possible or easy and others difficult or impossible, by leading us to engage in or to attempt certain kinds of rhetorical actions rather than others. (x)
Following how a technology’s affordances create particular responses in users reveals rhetorical possibilities that the affordances encourage, and even create. Extending Miller’s direction, following affordances helps articulate what properties of information and interaction encourage rhetorical actions in operating a particular technology as well as what kinds of rhetorical actions are most encouraged. Tracing the persuasive in the affordances a technology creates thus provides a way of exploring interaction while attending to an instrument’s productive, material rhetorics. Following the affordances a visualization technology creates, then—and going back to Michel Foucault’s architecture of making visible, as discussed in the introduction—helps to identify some of the available possibilities that shape what can become visible.
As I analyze the operating dynamics of the STM in light of their affordances, I also observe the interactions the operating dynamics encourage in relation to four main ways of characterizing interaction from HCI (human-computer interaction) studies in order to explore how the interaction configures possibilities for the user. In a survey of different views of interactivity from the HCI research traditions, Sally McMillan explains that the following four ways include three that are based on Claude Shannon’s model of communication as information a sender communicates to receiver: user communicating to computer; computer communicating to user; and an equal, adaptive interaction where “the computer is still in command of the interaction, but that it is more responsive to individual needs” (McMillan 175). The fourth constitutes interaction differently, in terms of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as “flow:” it “represents the user’s perception of the interaction with the medium as playful and exploratory” (qtd. in McMillan 173–4). “Flow” tends to include participation from both sides, so that neither computer nor user occupies either “sender” or “receiver” roles; instead, computer and user take on both roles, and so become co-creators or participants (McMillan 174). As McMillan further describes, flow is
characterized by a state of high user activity in which the computer becomes virtually transparent as individuals ‘lose themselves’ in the computer environment. Virtual reality systems seek this level, but it may also be characteristic of gaming environments and other situations in which the user interfaces seamlessly with the computer. (175)
These four models of interaction present different experiences for users; the interaction models may also generate different patterns of user response, further determining how users interface with the computer through the screen. Comparing STM dynamics to the models of interaction provides a more specific sense of how STM dynamics are structured.
Studies in rhetoric, science, and HCI identify “interactivity” as the structuring of events that involve writers/users, media, knowledge and information, and users/readers in particular configurations. A focus on “interactivity,” then, is also a focus on finding, describing, and analyzing interfaces—places of interaction, boundaries where forces or disparate elements meet. This chapter begins my focus on interactivity as I identify, describe, and analyze interfaces; Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 further analyze interfaces. In the next section, I analyze STM dynamics to identify the affordances that instruments create that, in turn, impact the shaping of inscription practices scientists engage in when using the STM. The STM dynamics influence the form of the inscriptions that help create scientific statements, and so shape nanotechnology and the concept of the atom. The affordances shape rhetorical possibilities inherent in the inscription practices that are also visible in the inscriptions themselves, as I explain below.
Manipulating Atoms: Microscope Interactions
Three main dynamics within extant visualization and instrumental traditions in science and related technologies help constitute the visualization practices of the STM: electron tunneling, raster scanning, and image processing using a graphic user interface (GUI). Each of these three dynamics structures interactions between apparatus, user, data, and the nanoscale; informs how instruments mediate the transformation of phenomena to data and to image; and helps structure how scientists interpret the data in the image. While each of these main dynamics functions separately to some extent, the interactions between the dynamics combine, expanding connections and enhancing the intensities that each may possess alone. The coordinated interactions of the dynamics of electron tunneling, raster scanning, and GUI image processing then enable the STM to function, producing and arranging data about the nanoscale, thus affecting what STM images convey and how the images do so. The coordinated interactions of the STM operating dynamics structure the possibilities for making atoms visible—and also help create the productive rhetorical possibilities of the STM.
Electron Movement: Tunneling Electrons and Interactive Surfaces
One of the major dynamics on which the design of the STM is based relies on the interactions between a conductive surface (composed of a metal, for example) and the microscope tip, as the tip does not contact the surface, but remains about a nanometer away (Mantooth 9). Instead of contact, the interaction between tip and surface is a result of electron tunneling. Tunneling is based on the articulation of electrons as both particles and waves in quantum mechanics, where “each electron behaves like a wave: its position is ‘smeared out’” (Binnig and Rohrer, “The Scanning Tunneling Microscope” 52). The behavior of electrons as both particles
