Ambient Engineering: Hyper-Nudging, Hyper-Relevance, and Rhetorics of Nearness and Farness in a Post-AI Algorithmic World
Thomas Rickert · Rhetoric Society Quarterly · 2024
This essay argues that algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) are producing a transformation in the economics of attention. Attention is a limited concept, a point I demonstrate by providing a phenomenological understanding of attending via Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, specifically showing the usefulness of the existential and platial concepts of nearness and farness. Emerging, AI-driven techniques of hyper-nudging and hyper-relevance address themselves to our senses of nearness and farness. Hyper-relevance is particularly significant as it is proleptic in trying to anticipate concernful engagement, without directly soliciting it, by transforming the conditions of possibility for modes of attending. I call such techniques ambient engineering, which are concerned with transforming the conditions for producing salience. Ambient engineering has consequences for rhetorical practice and theory, including greater focus on sub-attentive engagements, and thus it also seeks to elide more traditional forms of suasion.