Task #7

While the keyword "interactive" hits 151 million results on Google, the legitimate question we give to ourselves is wether the semantic behind it is reshaping due to a change in technology and society. It is an exceptionally hard task (the sole frequent association of the word with the term "buzzword" easily leads us to think that way-too-many are confused about it) and in order to avoid confusion it's essential to find relevant literature.

The two -about 10 years old- papers previously analysed try to sum up the characteristics of modern interactivity from the point of view of different scholar disciplines and subsequently create definitions which could be exhaustively descriptive of interaction itself, but in my opinion fail to give an -even lower level- explanation of what interactivity means.

Kristo Vaher in his blog points out the english origin of the word Interactivity from the word interaction. I would like to go even deeper and trace what interactivity means to me by tracking the latin origin of the word.

Interaction derives from inter (in between) + agere (to act, to do) and it refers to an inter-mutual action between two elements, or in other word, to the space (in a figurative way) between the action of two elements. Wether we talk about human communication mediated by technology or the communication between a human and a machine through a UI, interaction is the act that is being carried and inter-activity is a characteristic of any of the two parts.

Said this, I do not mean to extremely simplify my vision of the concept itself, but to try to distinguish the concept of interactivity itself from the dimensions of interactivity.

In fact, Spiro Kiousis' paper well defines those in 3 categories in "structure of technology", "communication context" and "user perception".Those categories, which in my opinion well describe the main dimensions of interactivity, seem to be enough technology-neutral to describe also contemporary scenarios. Afterall, one side of the interactions (the humans) will most likely keep most of their characteristics for still long time and machines will have to shape (and re-shape) themselves around them.