Interactivity in Society: Locating an Elusive Concept - CiteSeerX

The Information Society, 20: 373–383, 2004 c Taylor & Francis Inc. Copyright
ISSN: 0197-2243 print / 1087-6537 online DOI: 10.1080/01972240490508063

Interactivity in Society: Locating an Elusive Concept Erik P. Bucy Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

Interactivity has been identified as a core concept of new media, yet despite nearly three decades of study and analysis, we scarcely know what interactivity is, let alone what it does, and have scant insight into the conditions in which interactive processes are likely to be consequential for members of a social system. This article attempts to address this deficiency by critiquing three self-defeating tendencies and an erroneous assumption of interactivity research, then proposes four basic propositions around which systematic knowledge regarding interactivity in society may be built. In the spirit of bridging mass and interpersonal processes, a model of interactivity is proposed to initiate discussion about the concept as a cross-level and multivalent phenomenon—one with both positive and negative consequences—and to spur more socially relevant research. For interactivity to succeed as a concept, it must have some meaningful social and psychological relevance beyond its technical status as a property of media systems or message exchanges.

Keywords

interactivity, media interaction, user perceptions, reciprocal communication, technology affordances

Interactivity seems to be at the core of new media technologies, and studying it in the context of networked communication has broad social implications. Indeed, van Dijk (1999) characterizes the development of mediated interactive communication as a major structural change produced by the communications revolution, enabled by the convergence or integration of telecommunications, data communications, and mass communications into a single medium. However, while the term interactivity has gained currency in the popular literature, the study of interactivity remains for the most part pretheoretical, focused on description and typologizing rather than prediction and Received 21 June 2003; accepted 16 May 2004. The author thanks Harmeet Sawhney for his thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this article. Address correspondence to Erik P. Bucy, Associate Professor, Department of Telecommunications, 1229 E. Seventh Street, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405-5501 USA. E-mail: ebucy@ indiana.edu

testing. “Looking for interactivity in communication can be treacherous,” Newhagen, Cordes, and Levy (1995) observed, “because, however widely used the term might be, it is rarely clearly conceptualized” (p. 165). After nearly three decades of study and analysis, we scarcely know what interactivity is, let alone what it does, and have scant insight into the conditions in which interactive processes are likely to be consequential for members of a social system. Either as a social or individual-level process, interactivity is undertheorized.1 This introductory essay argues that the study of interactivity has been stunted by the lack of a coherent theory of interactivity to explain how the phenomenon operates in society. Studies of interactivity have been preoccupied with defining the elusive concept and documenting instances of its existence in various mediated contexts. Scholars are particularly keen to associate different media technologies with varying degrees of interactivity. While these efforts have yielded some important insights into the critical role of interactive communication, they have fallen short of proposing an actual theoretical framework around which systematic knowledge regarding interactivity can be built. The essays in this forum address this deficit in the literature by tracing interactivity’s technical and perceptual foundations, its impact across different contexts and levels of analysis, and inconsistencies in the use of the term itself. In this space I consider some of the critical issues confronting research in this area and propose a curvilinear model of interactivity in society to initiate discussion about the concept as a cross-level and multivalent phenomenon and to spur more socially relevant research.

THREE SELF-DEFEATING TENDENCIES AND AN ERRONEOUS ASSUMPTION Since Rafaeli’s (1988) widely cited explication of the concept, interactivity research has been hampered by three self-defeating tendencies and an erroneous assumption. First, there has been an obsession with typologizing different interactive technologies and categorizing different

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forms and aspects of interactivity. Classification aids in initial understanding of a new process or area of investigation but represents surface-level knowledge and offers little insight without an associated theoretical framework. Absent the ensuing theory of evolution, for example, Darwin’s observations about wildlife in the Galapagos Islands would have amounted to little more than exotic documentation, noted only in the annals of life scientists. Similarly, interactivity research has been mired in a largely misdirected discussion of “what exists” at the expense of explaining “why things happen” (see Reynolds, 1971). Second, interactivity researchers have been fixated on continually reformulating the operational definition of the concept with little or no empirical testing to justify new and competing formulations. Frequently, new terms are introduced only to describe a phenomenon, distinction, or classification system identified years earlier. In other words, interactivity research is marked by the selfdefeating tendency to rediscover the wheel—a problem that plagues efforts to define interactivity as well as typologize its instantiation. When interactivity is carefully measured, there tends to be a dearth of it where an abundance is expected (Bucy et al., 1999; Rafaeli & Sudweeks, 1998; Stromer-Galley, 2000)—a situation that stems, in part, from attempts to locate it as a property of media systems or message exchanges rather than user experiences with technology (see McMillan, 2000; Schultz, 1999; Steuer, 1995). Third, despite the obvious consequences for twoway communication in society, interactivity is rarely analyzed or discussed in research as a mass communication phenomenon—something, for instance, that may occur through broadcast (radio and television) as well as networked media. The erroneous assumption of most interactivity research (and industry pronouncements) is that two-way communication is uniformly desirable and predominantly associated with positive outcomes. Rafaeli (1988), for example, catalogued a host of presumed benefits, including increased acceptance, satisfaction, learning, and mastery; enhanced thoughtfulness, cooperation, and responsibility; and, heightened performance, motivation, and sociability. Noting that some empricial evidence suggested certain “dangers and pitfalls” related to interactivity (e.g., added cost, increased demands, cumbersome modes of communicating), he maintained that “any negative effects of interactivity are a surprise finding given the intuitive, cheerful expectations for across-the-board positive effects” (Rafaeili, 1988, p. 126). Although some studies are now beginning to identify the limitations and undesirable consequences of interactive processes (e.g., Bucy, 2004; Liu & Shrum, 2002; Shaw et al., 1993; Sundar et al., 2003), few researchers have attempted to specify the important contingent conditions that delimit interactivity’s appeal and presumed benefits. Upon close inspection, interactivity’s

downsides—its dangers and pitfalls—may heavily constrain its rosy promise. While these tendencies in the literature haven’t slowed the rate of scholarly publication (see Macmillan, 2002), they have occluded the development of a coherent and fully formulated theory of interactivity. The following review critiques each of these tendencies in turn, with the hope that by highlighting the area’s shortcomings future research will be able to move beyond these conceptual cul-de-sacs and advance our understanding of interactive processes. A FIXATION WITH TAXONOMY Since the emergence of interactivity as a variable of interest to media and technology studies in the mid-1970s, most interactivity research has been descriptive and concerned with classification and typologizing rather than empirical testing and theory building (e.g., Chapanis, 1975; Dominick, 1983; Durlak, 1987; Gayeski & Williams, 1985; Heeter, 1989; Jensen, 1998; McMillan, 2000; Rafaeli, 1988; Rice & Associates, 1984; Schultz, 1999; Steuer, 1995; Stromer-Galley, 2000). The field’s taxonomic outlook arises from the scholarly need to conceptually locate new information and communication technologies (ICTs) in relation to traditional mass media as well as the penchant to distinguish the latest “new media” from more established technologies. The technology itself, everchanging and novel, seems to encourage such ongoing efforts at conceptual placement (see Williams et al., 1994). Unlike the physical or life sciences, whose central objects of study change slowly, over millennia, ICTs are in continual flux and are evolving at an accelerating rate. This presents a challenge for interactivity researchers to remain focused on enduring user issues rather than malleable surface features. In interactivity studies, a fixation with taxonomy, which applies to both the technologies themselves as well as user relationships with technology, has been a fixture of the research landscape since the earliest going. For a variety of reasons, the field has not really moved beyond this preliminary phase, as reviews of the literature attest (e.g., Jensen, 1998; Kiousis, 2002; McMillan, 2002). In this tradition, Stromer-Galley (this issue) discusses how the different types of interactivity that may occur online can be categorized into two general dimensions: interactivity as product and interactivity as process. The first type involves interaction with content, addressing the control that users exercise over the selection and presentation of online content, whether story text, audiovisuals, or multimedia, and other aspects of the interface (see also Massey & Levy, 1999). In a comprehensive attempt at classification, McMillan (2002) has referred to product interactivity as a type of user-to-system interaction, while Stromer-Galley (2000) earlier employed the term media interaction. A decade before, Rafaeli (1988, p. 120)

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referred to such interactions as reactive communication. The second type of interactivity that may occur online involves person-to-person conversations mediated by the technology, a process Massey and Levy (1999) labeled interpersonal interactivity. McMillan’s (2002) term for the same form of interaction is user-to-user, while StromerGalley (2000) has referred to the human interaction that political candidates on their campaign sites seek to avoid.2 REDISCOVERING THE WHEEL Because they remain focused on typologizing and definitional concerns, rather than building on the findings of earlier studies, interactivity researchers have developed a real knack for “rediscovering the wheel.”3 Even a cursory intellectual archaeology of the interactivity concept reveals that some of the field’s central conceptualizations are recapitulations of earlier formulations. Perhaps most famously (because it is so widely cited), Rafaeli’s (1988) responsiveness model draws directly from and owes its lineage to Bretz’s (1983) model of interactivity, which distinguishes between quasi-interaction and full interaction. Rafaeli defines full interactivity as a message sequence of at least three recursive iterations in which each new message incorporates references to previous exchanges (1988, p. 111). In this formulation, full interactivity cannot begin until the third message in an exchange when the initiator has the opportunity for follow-up—a criterion established by Bretz, who wrote that “two actions are not enough to characterize a system as interactive; there must be three” (1983, p. 13). Rafaeli’s conceptualization extends Bretz’s definition by emphasizing prolonged engagement and recognizing three pertinent levels of interactivity. Beyond message-based definitions of the concept are structural approaches to interactivity that emphasize the calls to action that different interface features afford (see Sundar, this issue). Underlying structural definitions of interactivity is the assumption that the more opportunities for immediate user involvement, and the greater the speed of the feedback channel, the more interactive is the media experience. Thus, Laurel (1986) identified frequency of user choices, the significance of interface actions, and the range of how many choices are available as important elements of interactive processes. Laurel (1991) later added that the feeling of interactivity, or the user’s sense of “participating in the ongoing action of the representation” (pp. 20–21), could arise from other factors, such as sensory immersion or tight coupling of kinesthetic input and visual response. Steuer (1995) similarly emphasized three factors that contribute to interactivity—speed of interaction or response time, the range of attributes that can be manipulated in a mediated environment, and the ability of a system to map its controls to user actions in a natural and predictable manner.

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In communication environments considered inherently interactive, such as virtual reality, electronic messaging, and other computer-mediated contexts, control— specifically, the capacity to semantically influence or physically alter the content of reciprocally active message exchanges—emerges as an important recurring (and repeatedly discovered) concept. Along these lines, Steuer (1995) defined interactivity as the “extent to which users can participate in modifying the form and content of a mediated environment in real time” (p. 46). Similarly, Neuman (1991) asserted that interactivity is “characterized by increased control over the communication process by both the sender and receiver” (p. 104). Williams, Rice, and Rogers (1988) posited that interactivity was “the degree to which participants in a communication process have control over, and can exchange roles in, their mutual discourse” (p. 10). And Jensen (1998) concluded that interactivity is “a measure of a media’s potential ability to let the user exert an influence on the content and/or form of the mediated communication’ (p. 201). Despite the confidence and similarity of such assertions, these conceptual definitions are seldom tied to a consistent program of empirical research with the potential to validate or refute unverified claims. Thus, interactivity researchers seem to continually “discover” the same “new” processes and classification schemes identified by previous scholars years or decades earlier. The reassuring aspect of rediscovering the wheel is that we seem to be converging on a set of agreed upon dimensions and typologies. A persistent problem with interactivity studies is that, following a period of initial fascination, researchers tend to lose interest and (after introducing their competing definition or typology) move on to other topics. Delimiting the Concept Although the aim of this article is not to provide another, competing definition of interactivity, it seems prudent to delimit the concept to further discourage its haphazard use. Interactivity, first and foremost, should be reserved to describe reciprocal communication exchanges that involve some form of media, or information and communication technology. Contrary to the assertions of some authors (e.g., Isotalus, 1998; Rafaeli & Sudweeks, 1998), interactivity should not be considered synonymous with social interaction, person-to-person conversation, or faceto-face communication. Interactivity may be a special case of mediated social interaction, as with online chat, discussion forums, or teleconferencing, but it can also take the form of impersonal interactions with media content or nonhuman agents—audio/video downloads, e-mail requests to a listserv majordomo, computer game playing, e-commerce transactions, and various other forms of

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content interactivity. Limiting the concept to exchanges that are in some way mediated by technology begins to distinguish the term from any form of communication and discourages its wanton application as a universal descriptor of all forms of dialogue (Jensen, 1998; Kiousis, 2002).4 Where Interactivity Resides. Careful delineation of the concept should also address the question, implied but often unarticulated in research, of where interactivity resides. Reviews of the literature generally locate interactivity as a property of the technology, the communication setting, or the perceptions of users (Bucy, 1995; Kiousis, 2002; Lee, 2000; McMillan, 2002; McMillan & Hwang, 2002). Figure 1 presents the various loci and observational contexts of interactivity identified in the literature, along with some attendant conceptual considerations. As indicated in the bottom row of the diagram, locating interactivity as a feature of technology equates the phenomenon with the set of interface actions that the systems allows. However, unless a medium’s technological affordances are recognized and understood by users, they will remain unutilized (Norman, 1999)—a problem that can lead to “usage gaps” or the inability of less sophisticated users to take full advantage of advanced technology (van Dijk, 2000). Technological definitions are conceptually limiting in that they do not take into account how different media may be experienced by different user groups. Defining interactivity as only those actions and reactions that are physically observable (e.g., Heeter, 2000; see also Sundar, this issue) does not provide for the possibility that interactivity is an experiential rather than technological factor. The middle row of the diagram points to the communication setting as the locus of interactivity and indicates that interactive processes can—among other places—be observed in message exchanges (e.g., Rafaeli & Sudweeks, 1998). Such message-related definitions enable precise measurement through analysis of transcripts and other aspects of interpersonal or organizational communication,

but they tend to rarify the concept with a strict definitional standard and give exclusive attention to computermediated communication while ignoring mass media. Central to both message-related and technology-oriented definitions of interactivity is the control that users exercise over the form and content of mediated exchanges. However, media users may have the sense of participating in a meaningful two-way exchange without ever achieving actual control over the content or performing an observable communication behavior (or, for that matter, without satisfying Bretz and Rafaeli’s three-message criterion). Instead, they may simply feel themselves, again in Laurel’s words, to be “participating in the ongoing action of the representation.” As with other areas of social research, approaching interactivity studies from the vantage point of the audience member or individual user—from a bottom-up perspective, as it were—may lead to new conceptual criteria. From the user’s perspective, for example, some new media formats may be perceived as affording opportunities to interact or participate, even if they do not possess many of the features associated with interactivity by researchers (Bucy & Newhagen, 1999b; Morrison, 1998). Depending on their skill level and experience with advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs) different users may perceive a different range of affordances, or set of actions that a technology makes possible, for the same medium (see Norman, 1999). The top row of Figure 1 locates interactivity in user perceptions, which are manifested as subjective experience. Although perceived interactivity is not physically observable, it can be reliably measured, just as attitudes, perceived behavioral influence, and other perceptual constructs are reliably measured (see McMillan & Hwang, 2002). Indeed, a content analysis of audience e-mail messages to NBC Nightly News (Newhagen et al., 1995) aptly demonstrated how individual users may perceive a communication setting to be interactive, even when there are

FIG. 1. Where interactivity resides. A diagram showing the various loci of interactivity, its observational contexts, and attendant conceptual considerations.

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no obvious signs of user control or system/receiver reciprocity. The study found that viewers addressed their email communications to NBC at three different levels—a mass or macroscopic level (to a large audience, much like a letter to the editor), an organizational or mezzoscopic level (to the network, Nightly News team), and an interpersonal or microscopic level (to Tom Brokaw or the news staff). Messages written at an interpersonal level stood out for their sense of urgency and high degree of perceived system interactivity, defined as the expectation of receiving a response. One optimistic writer, fully expecting a response, told the network, “If you have no objections, I’ll share your reply with my friends” (Newhagen et al., 1995, p. 168). Except for sharing the messages with researchers, NBC never responded to them in any way.5 Newhagen, Cordes, and Levy (1995) contend that there is a close relationship between the viewer’s psychological sense of efficacy and their sense of the media system’s interactivity, an assertion that warrants empirical examination. The fact that audiences may perceive a communication setting as interactive even when it lacks apparent control, communicative reciprocity, or behavioral opportunities highlights the psychological dimension of interactivity, which has also been inferred by new media theorists on the basis of qualitative analysis (e.g., Holmqvist, 1993; Laurel, 1991; Pearce, 1997; Turkle, 1984). Importantly, focusing on user perceptions unbinds the interactivity from a strictly computer-mediated or message-based context and opens the door to mass communication analyses, where it may be versatilely employed. Thus, any networked medium or communication setting perceived as interactive becomes so to the user—an insight supported by a large body of research. In their summary of some three dozen experiments involving user interactions with communication technologies, Reeves and Nass (1996) conclude that “what seems to be true is often more influential that what really is true. . . perceptions are far more influential than reality” (p. 253). Similarly, Hoffman and Novak (1996), citing the self-efficacy and persuasion literatures (e.g., Bandura, 1977; Azjen, 1988), comment that “a consumer’s perception of behavioral control. . . and its impact on intentions and actions is more important than real control” (p. 64).6 Inasmuch as interactive communication centers on engaging the user, the experience of interactivity seems paramount. Providing that interactivity is defined as a perceptual variable, with the proper cues (e.g., an appeal from the host to communicate with the network), even watching the nightly news may elicit a sense of interactivity in the viewer (Bucy & Newhagen, 1999a, 1999b). Furthermore, as some researchers have suggested (e.g., Screven, 1999), orientation to interact with media technology may be a personality characteristic: “A participant’s general dispositions help to define their overall orientation toward

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designed experiences” (Heeter, 2000, n.p.). In developing a theory of interactivity that may eventually generalize across different technologies and settings, user perceptions and dispositions should not be discounted. The importance of locating interactivity as a perceptual (or even personality) variable rather than an exhibited behavior or exacting communication exchange is that it routinizes the concept and makes it a part of everyday media experience. At present the tendency is to regard interactivity as an almost unattainable ideal that is rarely observed or practiced (see Rafaeli & Sudweeks, 1998). The more constraining the definition imposed by research, the more most communication will, as Rafaeli and Sudweeks (1998, p. 176) readily admit, fall short of full interactivity. Routinizing interactivity by designating it as a perceptual variable (albeit with social, behavioral, and technological correlates) should encourage the concept’s theoretical development by enabling empirical measurement through attitudinal and emotional scales and qualitative elaboration through focus group research and open-ended questions, allowing systematic knowledge about interactivity to accumulate (see Downes & McMillan, 2000; Kiousis, 2002; McMillan, 2000; McMillan & Hwang, 2002). From this discussion, the first proposition can be formulated: P1: Interactivity is best (though not exclusively) understood as a perceptual variable that involves communication mediated by technology.

RECONSIDERING INTERACTIVITY’S ROSY PROMISE Since the advent of digital media, interactive processes generally have been thought to be goal enhancing, leading to increased motivation, acceptance, satisfaction, and learning, as well as more thoughtful engagement with the task at hand (see Rafaeli, 1988).7 However, recent empirical studies call some of these early findings and assumptions into question. From their investigations on the effects of varying degrees of interactivity and communication modalities on interpersonal interaction, Burgoon et al. (2002) conclude that “interactivity itself is value-neutral, although the outcomes associated with it may be valueladen” (p. 661), that is, positive or negative. Nevertheless, the erroneous assumption of much interactivity research is that two-way communication is uniformly desirable and predominantly associated with positive outcomes.8 In a mass media context, this is the equivalent of saying that an increase in the sheer volume of news coverage will invariably leave all viewers more informed; in fact, the 24-hour news cycles of cable television and proliferation of online information sources have not led to a uniform (or even noticeable) increase in public knowledge. Similarly, when it comes to interactivity, more is not necessarily better.

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Recent studies examining the processing and perception of online news, for example, have found that multimedia downloads, a type of product interactivity, hinder memory and contribute to negative perceptions of the web site overall, along with negatively impacting assessments of news quality (Sundar, 2000). Online, interactive features may exact a considerable cognitive and emotional cost by demanding more patience, expertise, and cognitive resources of the user, increasing the likelihood of confusion, frustration, and reduced memory (Sundar, 2000). The resulting experience of disorientation, a common problem in hypermedia environments (Conklin, 1987; Thuring et al., 1995), may then elicit negative evaluations. Bucy (2004) found a similar pattern of discordant results—of multimedia contributing to emotional frustration yet producing favorable evaluations—in user responses to major newspaper and television network news sites, a pattern of findings labeled the interactivity paradox. Beyond news, interactivity effects have been examined in political, marketing, and entertainment contexts (Liu & Shrum, 2002; Stromer-Galley, 2000; Vorderer et al., 2001). In the realm of online politics, interactive conditions have been associated with positive candidate assessments, especially among politically apathetic subjects (Sundar et al., 1998). But too much interactivity can have harmful results, again owing in part to the extra demands placed on the user: While moderate levels of web site interactivity can contribute to a political candidate’s appeal, higher levels call for greater user involvement with interface features and can detract from it. Specifically, participants in high-interactivity conditions may judge candidates as less caring and qualified than those in moderate or low interactivity conditions (Sundar et al., 2003). This may be due to the extra effort needed to navigate through additional layers of information without the actual benefit of obtaining more information. In a marketing context, Liu and Shrum (2002) question the influence of interactivity on advertising effectiveness and find in several instances that interactivity actually has a detrimental effect, especially when accompanied by novel or difficult tasks (see Ariely, 2000; Bezjian-Avery et al., 1998). Sophistication, whether in the form of multimedia literacy or information-processing ability, seems to play an important mediating role in determining the direction of interactive outcomes. A study of interactive movie viewing by Vorderer, Knobloch, and Schramm (2001) found that viewers with lower cognitive capacity feel more entertained and evaluate a film more positively when they watch without any interactivity, or choice over story direction, than with. Viewers with greater cognitive capacity, by contrast, evaluated the same movie more positively when they watched interactively. These authors predict that interactive media will be successful only with that portion of the general audience with the

cognitive skills necessary to benefit from information complexity. Looking past the hyperbole and wishful thinking associated with interactive media, the finding that interactivity does not contribute uniformly, or in a linear fashion (Sundar et al., 2003), to positive impressions of user experiences with new technology should not be surprising. Information-processing and behavioral performance models in psychology have long noted the relationship between overstimulation and decreased cognitive and behavioral performance (see Hebb, 1949; Leuba, 1955). As Hebb (1949, p. 199) observed with his inverted U-curve of arousal, increasing levels of stimulation are beneficial up to a point, but then once an optimal level is attained, as intensity continues to increase, performance suffers. Moreover, in an interactive environment such as the Web, the role of the user is that of active information seeker, requiring online media audiences to perform their own story and feature selection, or gatekeeping (Sundar & Nass, 2001). Education and cognitive skills may moderate the effects of placing increased demands on users, giving an advantage to more sophisticated audience members (Vorderer et al., 2001). Contrary to some early, optimistic assumptions, then, interactivity’s romanticized promise of universal benefits fails to hold up under close scrutiny. SOCIETAL RELEVANCE: THE MISSING LINK For interactivity to succeed as a concept, it must have some meaningful social and psychological relevance. Indeed, beyond the specific shortcomings noted already, what is missing from the literature is a broad statement of interactivity’s common patterns of impacts on users—the predictable outcomes that interactive processes may have across different user groups. As Rafaeli and Sudweeks (1998, p. 187) rightfully observe, “We are still far from a theory of interactivity” that offers a coherent framework for systematic investigation to proceed. Because interactive processes cut across different levels of analysis— an important point examined by Newhagen in his essay on dynamic symbol processing (this issue)—a full account of interactivity must begin with the recognition that it is a phenomenon that may occur at multiple levels.9 On one level, interactive exchanges are interpersonal in that they simulate an individual conversation; on another level, mediated interactions can take the form of mass communication in which the sender (news anchor, talk show host, politician, etc.), in the process of responding to an individual message or news event, broadcasts a message to a mass audience—one receiver at a time. Viewing the audience as individualized grows out of an effort in media research, active since the late 1980s

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(see Hawkins et al., 1988), to bridge different levels of analysis between mass and interpersonal communication. As Beniger (1987) has noted, the gulf dividing these two levels may be spanned and more cross-boundary work promoted by “reformulat[ing] the interpersonal-mass distinction in terms of subjective effects communication has on receivers and the causes of these effects” (p. 363). Beniger’s focus on subjective effects of communication is consistent with the first proposition, namely, that interactivity is best (though not exclusively) understood as a perceptual variable residing within the individual. Indeed, unless a communication setting is experienced and perceived as interactive, no amount of technological features, physical engagement, or message exchange will make it that way for the user. However, research should not be satisfied with merely identifying when a communication setting is perceived as interactive (although more work needs to be done in this area) but ultimately address itself to the consequences of varying degrees and types of interactivity in society. In the case of an abiding miscalibration between user skills and system challenges, for example, the interactive technology may prevail and alienate average users from the Web’s social, economic, and informational bounty.10 Yet, even assuming optimal calibration of high-skill users with advanced technology, an escalating volume of interactivity cannot be sustained indefinitely. Figure 2 adapts Hebb’s inverted U-curve of arousal to illustrate the possible consequences of interactive communication at the interpersonal and mass levels of analysis.11 The personal band represents interactions that occur on an individual level, while the social band represents

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interactions that occur on a broader societal level, or mass scale. In the figure, the curved lines show the intensity of interactive communication, ranging from low to moderate to high in a nonlinear fashion, and the horizontal axis indicates whether the consequences of mediated interaction are positive or negative. On the positive side, the personal band shows the presumed benefits of interactivity typically discussed in the literature—increased engagement, knowledge gain (or uncertainty reduction), user satisfaction, and efficacy. However, once an optimal (moderate) level of interactivity is achieved, continued increases in intensity begin to overwhelm the user. The downward part of the curve suggests that a growing volume of intense interaction can lead to irritation, frustration, information overload, and eventually withdrawl—a contention supported by the computer frustration literature (see Bessiere et al., 2004; Bucy, 2004) as well as existing interactivity research.12 Within the social band, a similar pattern of positive consequences followed by negative social effects is predicted. At low levels of interactivity, such as that afforded by new media, a certain level of sociality and civic engagement may be cultivated, leading to norms of reciprocity and possibly the formation of social capital (see Bucy & Gregson, 2001; Putnam, 2000). As the information environment becomes ever more interactive, individualized, and fragmented, however, shared experiences across unlike groups may diminish, encouraging selfishness and self-indulgence (Turow, 1997). As common understandings further erode, the door opens to conflict and social discord, not unlike the breakdown in social stability predicted by the knowledge gap hypothesis (see Tichenor

FIG. 2. A curvilinear model of interactivity in society showing presumed effects of interactive communication at the individual and social level of analysis.

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et al., 1970). From this curvilinear model of interactivity, three additional propositions can be derived: P2: Interactivity is desirable up to a point and then has negative consequences. P3: Interactivity effects may occur at an individual as well as social level of analysis. P4: Interactivity effects at the individual level may influence outcomes at the social level.

CONCLUSION The aim of this essay has been to highlight some of the important contingent conditions that constrain interactivity’s appeal and presumed benefits. Given the negative and paradoxical findings of several recent interactivity studies, theory building should probably proceed inductively, using specific results to arrive at general conclusions. As with other research on information and communication technologies, these efforts should be user centered so that new knowledge can be built around patterns of impacts on users rather than around ever-changing hardware developments. By delimiting the concept to mediated interactions and locating interactivity primarily in user experiences with technology, some definitional agreement may be achieved. And by transitioning into a phase of more programmatic research, some of the speculative assumptions about interactivity may be supplanted by a more realistic set of verifiable results, which should inform and shape the theory-building process. As a starting point in that process, interactivity should be regarded primarily as a perceptual variable enabled by technology that resides within individuals but whose consequences, like research on knowledge gaps, usage gaps, and other socially relevant phenomena, deserve discussion and achieve broader meaning at a mass level of analysis. NOTES 1. Some notable attempts to theorize interactivity in the pre-Web era include work by Markus (1987), who analyzed technology adoption within organizations, and Gonzalez (1989), who examined the role of feedback in Third World development campaigns. Neither of these efforts quite qualifies as a bona fide theory of interactivity, however. Markus’s critical mass theory of interactive media is more concerned with technology adoption than interactivity, and Gonzalez’s definition of interactive communication as a social relationship downplays the media aspect of the concept, which this essay argues is critical to differentiating interactivity from social processes not dependent on technology. 2. McMillan (2002), following Szuprowicz (1995), identifies a third type of interactivity, user-to-documents, which involves the “perceived interaction with content creators and actual creation of content” (p. 169).

3. Interactivity researchers are not unique in this regard. Meadow (1985, p. 172) identified this problem in relation to scholarly and lay theories of political communication 20 years ago. 4. In addition, there is a historical rationale for limiting the concept to interactions involving technology. To some extent the concept’s lineage dates to cybernetics theory, which considers the related process of feedback as a component of the communication channel itself (see Newhagen et al., 1995; Wiener, 1948). The study of social interaction has an entirely different intellectual history. 5. Personal communication with John Newhagen, 1 June 2003. 6. Heeter (2000) argues just the opposite—that defining interactivity as physical action separates the construct from perception, motivation, emotions, and thoughts. However, psychological experiences and subjective impressions are the key to finding commonalities between networked and traditional media as well as interpersonal and mass communication processes (see Beniger, 1987; Hawkins et al., 1988; Newhagen et al., 1995). As such, they should be emphasized and studied in new media research, not dismissed. Van Dijk (1999) reconciles the objective and subjective properties of interactive media by combining them in the notion of communication capacities, “a concept which carries the connotation of both defining (objective) and enabling (subjective) features” (p. 17). Similarly, Burgoon and colleagues conceive of interactivity “both according to a number of structural properties that afford or permit interactivity and according to the processes themselves that are the phenomenological experience of interacting” (Burgoon et al., 2000, p. 557). 7. The upbeat origins of interactivity stems from its association with data processing systems (mainframe computers) that “accept user input while a program is running, as opposed to ‘batch’ computers, which process only preloaded data without interruption. Interactive thus came to signify a modern, radically improved technology, usually in relation to an older one” (Aarseth, 1997, p. 48). For early mainframe systems, BASIC was an interactive programming language whereas COBOL was not (Gunton, 1992). In the realm of user experiences with contemporary digital media, however, the association of technological progress with improved performance and satisfaction is tenuous at best (see Landauer, 1995). 8. In this sense interactivity is not much different from other core concepts in social research, such as social capital, which are widely regarded as beneficial but which also have less desirable consequences. Portes (1998) describes the strong social capital within urban ethnic communities, for instance, that promotes a kind of insularity that excludes outsiders from employment opportunities. Another negative consequence of social capital—the social ties and support networks that exist in youth gangs—enables “success” in what would be considered criminal behavior. Noting that “sociability cuts both ways,” Portes (1998, p. 15) identifies four such forms of negative social capital: exclusion of outsiders, excess claims on group members, restrictions on individual freedoms, and downward leveling norms. 9. At least four levels of communication are routinely investigated by researchers—interpersonal, group, organizational, and mass—with cognitive processing studies aimed at a fifth level within the individual. For simplicity’s sake, only the individual and mass levels are considered here. 10. Mindful of this problem, multimedia companies like Jellyvision (creators of the popular You Don’t Know Jack trivia game) are attempting to develop more conversational interfaces for the World Wide Web that allow users “to forget that they are interacting with a machine and

INTERACTIVITY IN SOCIETY feel like the character in the computer is ‘talking’ to them” (Gottlieb, 2002). 11. This figure also draws on Newell’s (1990, p. 122) time scale of human action for its inspiration. 12. Online, the downsides to interactivity mount. When browsing the Web with a broadband connection to the Internet, for instance, users are exposed to monitoring in the form of Web cookies, viruses or other outside intrusions, information exposure and potential identity theft from hacking, and other potential losses of privacy, the dangers of which increase with file sharing (Flynn, 2003).

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