Task 7

My understanding of interactivity

After reading articles by Jensen and Kiousis who both observe and try to identify what interactivity actually is, it is still confusing to me – I could compare it with for example when a child asks you “what is life?” and probably he/she would get different answers from every adult. In my opinion to define interactivity as term in nowadays is hard, because every generation has a different background that differs from each other innormasly – if you would ask it from a 55 year old man and 15 year old boy then their understanding of interaction is based on what they think traditional medium for them is. One is used to television and radio media and other has grown up using computer most of his life.

Kiousis in his article introduced many theories on interactivity to give various background information and tried to give a definition to it himself. In my opinion he introduced good characteristics that interactivity consists – technology, communication context, user perception.

Technology is needed because typically interactivity is examined as a communication context between human cv machines or human to human via a machine (Rice, 1984; Kiousis). I would agree to that - the same factors could be applied to a normal face-to-face communication as for example in human to human via computer communication, but it is still hard to take them as same, because the environment where this interaction is taking place is completely different. For example communicating through computers users' can change the environment and have complete control over it as in normal everyday life the world is not changing according to our perception and interaction in it.

In my mind interactive environment is something where communication runs in both directions and the same communication has an impact to the environment that is controlled by the users. This way content in it, is created by the users who also can get immediate feedback to created content from other users – every user has a change to select, control and produce whatever kind of content they would like to see in a specific environment. In my opinion this can only work that purely in few mediums (for example internet), because it rises many questions if same characteristics are applied to some traditional mediums like television and radio, where nowadays viewer has more control over the content that they choose to consume, but at the same time the environment stays mainly the same.

Also one of the key characteristics in an interactive environment is the possibility to exchange feedback. A very good example would be Youtube that is an environment where users create its content (uploading videos) while others can comment on everyone's content to give immediate feedback. Also the users have a some control over what is posted. For example if they feel that some videos are too abbseen to be public, they can report and the video will be deleted. Youtube could not exist without it's users.

In conclusion as Jensen and Kiousis both did not succeeded to define “interactivity,” then for me it is also unclear mainly because the definition keeps changing with technology development. It can not be defined by the same rules that we had in 1950 or even in the beginning of this century, because the speed of technology development is increasing constantly – therefore the definition of interactivity keeps changing with it.