Lippman argued that ideal interactivity could be achieved under three conditions:
- Neither participant could see the direction that the interaction was headed
- There should be no destined route for the conversation to follow
- The participants should believe there would be an infinite number of directions that the conversation could head
(Stone 1995 in Lister p. 42)
However, I firstly don’t quite understand the concept of “Ideal Interactivity”. Surely this is a subjective matter, and what I would consider to be ideal interactivity could be extremely different to what would constitute ideal interactivity to you.
To me, for interactivity to be ideal it doesn’t necessarily have to have a conclusion or an outcome as it were, much online interactivity in my experience is merely discussing for the sake of discussing, or putting out an opinion which may have a purpose, but not lead to any sort of finish. One of the good things about online discussions is the time scales, an interaction can last as long or as be as brief as it needs to be, involving any number of participants and responses. This means that a discussion is completely free and open, to go in any direction it is led and raise any point it pleases. Therefore to me the idea of ideal interactivity doesn’t really exist, the mere presence of it being interactive from the outset means that this isn’t really possible, as I see no distinction between a good or a bad interactivity.
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Hi Kayley, good post!
ReplyDeleteI'm with you on interaction. But I think Lippman would agree, this is what he means by the 'routeless' open-endedness of 'ideal' interaction.
As pointed out in Lister and elsewhere, much of what has been trumpeted in the past as interaction with machines has been far from ideal. CMC, where machines mediate communication has suffered from this too. But don't you think that now we integrate e-mail, sms, Facebook, forums, blackboard etc into our daily lives and seldom carry on a CMC interaction solely in one channel, the 'interaction' is more approaching the ideal? It also has to be remembered that even f2f interaction seldom reaches the ideal? All too often their are tacit 'scripts' that we're following. Indeed, many discourse theorists say that without them most human interaction would fail (you would take too long to get the wrong thing accomplished -a bit like your IMDB experience!?) :-)