New Interactive Environments. Task five.

Concept of Interactivity.

To me interactivity is the action which takes place in "communication" between various people/things, for example, as we are mostly connected with computers, interactivity in this sense would be the environments we go and things we do in the Internet that respond to us either by showing something, going to another place, answering (voice or text or pictures), etc., and the exchange of this "communication" varies in a rapid way.

The article I read about the concept of interactivity would show us how the term has been handled throughout the years, since it is by now a background to history of interactivity.

The author, Jensen, contemplates about the notion of interactivity, which in many cases may vary its definition depending on the context. Initially one can find the meaning of this notion in very many fields, thus there is no clear-cut meaning of the term. The author contemplates about the various fields throughout the text in order to get the meaning of interactivity, but in the very end he does not find a single explanation for it.

Goetz and Jäckel establish three fields in which the term ’interactivity’ should be understood in order to establish the concept, and gives explanation of the term considering the fields:

• sociology - two people need to be present and "exchange and negotiation regading meaning takes place between those people who find themselves in the same social context";
• communication studies - any action between a person and the media is called interaction;
• informatics - the author suggests that it is the "relationship between people and machines". 

 He tries to dimensionalize interactivity to show how one should understand the term in various dimensions, but still the first, risk-free conclusion that he comes to is that the concept of interactivity is complex and there is no single explanation to it. The other, more thorough explanation would be a definition that he gives: "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".

I think this was a good trail of thought to sum up the concept which even the author considered not the final and the very best discussion of the term, but I think he suggests that there should be more done to explain the concept of interactivity.