Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being

Introduction: Circumnavigation World/Listening/Dwelling

1 As we move into the second millennium, we enter a time when new and often digital technologies are increasingly enmeshed with our everyday environment. Computer and telecommunications technologies are not only converging but also permeating the carpentry of the world, doing so in networks and technological infrastructures, houses and buildings, manufactured products, various sorts of content, and more. Information is not just externalized; it vitalizes our built environs and the objects therein, making them “smart,” capable of action. These innovations call us to reflect anew about our surroundings and the dispositions through which our rhetorical work emerges. We are entering an age of ambience, one in which boundaries between subject and object, human and nonhuman, and information and matter dissolve. While postmodern theory has contributed much to these shifts, contemporary science, digital production, radical connectivity, and ubiquitous technology push us still further. They not only impact our environment and how we interact with and within it but transform our knowledge about self and world. Such issues are not confined to academies, laboratories, think tanks, and boardrooms. Popular culture is replete with them, as the following two i n T R o D u c T i o n circumnavigation world/listening/Dwelling There’s you, the time, the logic, or the reasons we don’t understand. —Yes, “Close to the Edge” What I see is thinking; what I hear is thinking, too. —Atom Heart, “Abstract Miniatures in Memoriam Gilles Deleuze” Existence is not an individual affair. —Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway 2 introduction examples suggest. First, in the film Minority Report, database-driven ads liberated from their confinement to computer screens address citizens everywhere . In one scene, Tom Cruise’s character, fleeing from authorities, is confronted by a lively American Express ad that points out, “It looks like you need an escape, and Blue can take you there.” Such ads exemplify the externalization of information, for they are ubiquitous, interactive, and “smart.” Second, in M. T. Anderson’s adolescent novel Feed, children implanted with digitally connective “wetware” develop with immediate, internalized access to futuristic equivalents of our mobile phones and their various functions, including messaging, chat, and the transfer of various sorts of content, such as film, video, and music, thus replacing earlier methods of data access, including gaming platforms, radio, the Internet, and libraries—although in the novel these distinctions no longer apply. Just as in Minority Report, such technology also interacts with and monitors the citizenry. Looking at store merchandise immediately results in personally tailored sales pitches; trying to access certain kinds of data leads to investigative probes by obscure administrative authorities. Those who lack this technology are considered lesser humans. As the novel (troublesomely) makes plain, the convergence of informational, communications, and biological technologies changes what it means to be human and creates new distinctions in what it means to be different. These examples are significant not simply because they come from popular culture but because, given that origin, they already speak to everyday concerns. What is fictional and fantastic here permeates our everyday world, albeit without any sense of wonder or space for reflection. Both these examples portray imagined transformations in our senses of human being and how people interact in their environments, and as they do so, they elicit a small sense of celebration and a greater sense of unease. While this unease is not unwarranted, I would rather use it as a window on the fact that both examples involve communicative exchange and persuasion, and they do so in ways that challenge us to rethink accepted notions about these processes. In the Minority Report example, advertising is fully mobile and interactive; it is “smart” because it can assess, adapt to, and influence emerging situations, such as a man on the run who has been identified by networked computers accessing circulating data that are empowered to capitalize on his predicament. “Who” are the agents here? It would be arbitrary if not simplistic to assign agency solely to the human programming of computers. What technai are at work? Can the traditional emphases on sociality, discourse, intention, and so on suffice to describe such a rhetori- circumnavigation 3MMM cal situation? In the Feed example, where can we locate rhetorical work and exigence? Given the far-reaching technological extensions of humankind’s cognitive processes, it again seems simplistic to relegate rhetorical powers to humans alone. Does it not seem that rhetoric circulates through both...