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.

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.

New interactive environments Task #1

My personal experience with publishing (or social) tools is built upon different platforms.

Media i use for getting information and sharing news / status updates:

I use Google reader as an aggregator of feeds from various blogs (always too many to be checked manually, the counter in the reader is almost always on 1000+ ;) ) There i follow various feeds connected with my interests, but my main focus is on marketing, social media and photography. I normally check my google reader page once a day if i have enough time for the news.
I use twitter more often, i check my contacts' streams about 4/5 times a day through mobile. There i have more contacts with people i know in real life and many other streams from similar topics as my google reader. I tend to retweet often, but publish little.
I also use Facebook on daily basis. mainly for personal networking and work; there i also administer few business pages where i write contents, mainly with the purpose to let people interact with the brand. I'm not a big user of Facebook apps.
On Flickr i publish pictures and use the forums and the tools of the platform to search for tips about photography.
Last Fm collects silently data about my music usage. i login on their page about twice a month to find new music
Foursquare: just got a new badge. I often write tips for locations and try to use the ones i find.

Generally speaking, i would consider myself an half-engaged digital user. I use internet and social networks for many purposes (study, work, social activities, leisure) but tend to publish little "public contents" compared to what i read. I did not mention in this post other social networks i often use but consider less relevant in my media diet such as youtube, vimeo, tumblr, Google Buzz (although this last one is connected with my Google Reader), myspace, and even "old school" websites.

Digital tools:

Google Docs: for creating and editing documents. their collaborating capabilities showed to be very useful.
Prezi: a presentation tool.