Task #6 - New interactive Environmenrts

Interactivity: a concept explication by Spiro Kiousis is the result of a research over different explanations of the term interactivity.

The author tries in his work to describe what are the main characteristics of the concept of interactivity by analyzing the existing literature from different points of view and perception. In the beginning of the paper, while explaining what is the framework that he will use, he makes a point of all the existing visions of the concept of interactivity, spacing from the view of different schools of thoughs.

He then creates a table which will be used to map those different views. On one axis, the different intellectual perspective of communicators or non communicators: he divides the studies belonging to media studies and those that come from other "more independent fields" such as psychology or sociology. Another axis on the table is the one of the object emphasized: wether it's the technology, the communication setting or the perceiver.

What follows this is the work of the author to categorize and briefly analyze all the different texts and author's views, in order to organically put them in the table. The work exposes different approaches and some common directions over the basic properties of the definitions treated. The "blended" definition of interactivity given by the author includes 3 different dimensions: the structure of the technology used, the communication setting and the user perception. It is clear here how different approaches from different academical fields merged to identify one concept.

The final definition (that you will find at the end of this post) tries to be technology-neutral and ready to be used to measure "in real life" the level of "interactivity" of a certain technology.

This paper, congruent and well organized defines academically a concept often used as a buzzword in many different fields and essential to understand whenever one has to deal with new technologies. It's surprising how interaction design plays an essential role in the life of most people's lives and understanding how this delicate process happens seems like a challenging and extremely interesting task.

Here the definition of Interactivity given by Spiro Kiousis (2002):

Interactivity can be defined as the degree to which a communication technology can create a mediated environment in which participants can communicate (one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many), both synchronously and asynchronously, and participate in reciprocal message exchanges (third-order dependency). With regard to human users, it additionally refers to their ability to perceive the experience as a simulation of interpersonal communication and increase their awareness of telepresence.