Nudging/nudges/nudgable
adj. the inclination to go with the flow.
A foundational assumption of Soma Literacy is that we yearn for harmony with our world. We aspire to entrain to our surroundings: self to self, self to others, self to things, self to environment. This yearning for harmony or entrainment begets nudging. Here I mean nudging not in a patriarchal behavioral economics reference (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008), but rather, in the literal bumping of a body to be here not there. The desire to be in harmony with our world is so powerful that we, the performing individuals, self-nudge constantly to keep our personal in-the-moment trajectories in sync with our surroundings. Once recognized, this self-moderation, self-nudging becomes a powerful insight into the performativity of daily interactions. There are choices I make because I have had time to logic them out and can verbalize the intention, and there are thousands of others that I make below the level of conscious thought, decisions I make solely because they feel. I am in a constant bodied dialogue with my environment and am nudging myself into harmony or entrainment hundreds or thousands of times every day.
Another conceptualization of the artifact is that it is a work of persuasion [24] or rhetoric [15]. For [24], technology can be used
in persuasive ways (which suggests that some technologies are
not persuasive). . . . For both, persuasion/rhetoric is not merely transitive from the intentions of the designer to its effects on the user; in some sense, persuasion is projected by the interface itself.. . . [The] persuasive/rhetorical artifact argument suggests that an inanimate object—a design—is conditioning everyday, practical living. This claim has obvious ethical implications, which both [24] and [15] explicitly consider. Note that ethics is all but irrelevant if a design is just a tool, because ethical agency is situated squarely in the user. But if designs persuade people, or reshape everyday life, they can in that limited sense be understood to exercise agency and have an ethical dimension. (Bardzell, 2009, p. 2364)