Task 6: Interactivity, a concept explication

The current post contains a summary of an article by Spiro Kiousis around the concept of ‘interactivity’. In the article, it is stated that the emergence of new communication technologies has refined concepts in mass communication and consequently the concept of ‘interactivity’ which has been affected by technologies utilized in communication interactions, although it has been a controversy to define ‘interactivity’ either as a media or psychological variable in various context.

From the media point of view, interactivity is tightly related with internet and World Wide Web. Additionally, it has various levels across media that can be constant in time but differ significantly within individuals’ perceptions. Some authors have noted that feedback plays an important role in interaction which makes participants engage in message transactions. Some other related factors are social presence, transparency, user friendliness, speed, and timing flexibility. Furthermore, two-way communication, one-to-many and many-to-many communication experiences are considered as different ways of interactivity that give different levels of feedback.

In the article, there is a variety of ‘interactivity’ definitions form different aspects. In general, it has been classified as a relational variable. It’s declared that it can be defined as perceptions in individual level and also it can be considered in form, content, and structure of technology in relation to users in media level.

Having such controversies like interactivity as a medium or individual perceptions; differences between human and media interaction; and also content and interpersonal interactions have been created a mixture of concepts for instance, descriptions in communication and non-communication models.

Ultimately, the definition has been offered to consider both media and psychological variables contain three dimensions: Firstly medium structure; secondly features of communication settings; and thirdly the perceptions of users. However, ‘interactivity’ is still a vague and controversial issue to define and requires further experience and research.

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Task 5: ‘Interactivity’

This blog post aims to summarize an article by Jens F. Jensen, named “Tracking a New Concept in Media and Communication Studies” and points out some important notes about the concept of ‘interactivity’.

It has been tried to define the words “interactive” and “interactive media” from various aspects thus it seems that there are lots of confusion about them. The meaning which is a multidimensional concept has been tightly related to the discipline it has been applied. For instance, its functionality either in sociology or computer science can change the meaning. Additionally, it’s been claimed that “interactivity” in media communities is still vague or a “buzzword”, and still is an under-defined concept.

To investigate this concept in communication studies, it’s been declared that the advancement of communication science is affected by information societies’ models and methods; in particular, interactive communication technologies and new media. By the way, there is no definite distinguished concept of “interaction” in the field, since it highly depends on the context in which it has used.  For instance, the meaning of ‘interaction’ in media and communication studies refers to the actions of recipient related to the content of media; which the word has not been used in media technologies for a long time, instead more technically-oriented  remarks like ‘two way communication’ or ‘return channel’ systems were used. Subsequently, in the field of informatics (which is stated to be synonymous in media studies) ‘interaction’ is closer to the relationship between people and machines and does not include communication between two people (mediated by a machine).

In summary, there are three ways of describing the concept: Firstly as a prototype; secondly as criteria; and thirdly as a continuum. Among these the concept as a continuum found to be more suitable to define interactivity since it has various levels and there are different forms of interactivity as well. The different interactivity aspects can be categorized into four dimensions by means of communication models. These dimensions have been recognized as transmission (one-way user interaction by selecting information), consultation (user is able to select or request for information in a two-way media system), conversation (user can produce information in a two-way media system) and registration (media can adopt and reply to user’s request).

To sum up, the “interaction” concept is quite complex as there are a lot of uncertainty around the concept. Even with plotting various dimensions, there is no clear-cut outcome since the boundary is indistinct between user’s actions toward the information and each other or monitoring the users by systems and replying to their request sensitively. So perhaps it is still required to develop a better understanding toward the significance of ‘interactivity’ in media and communication studies.

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