Task 6. New Interactive Environments.

This week's task was to analyze Kiousis' piece- Interactivity: a concept explication. He bulges through a lot of literature to make his point clear, and in the end he manages to give his own definition of the term.

First he begins with reviewing what others have written about the term itself. He notes that in order to get the concept, one needs to "dig through" a lot of points in order to get the main message. He begins with others' thoughts of what interactivity really meant to them. First it was associated with communication technologies, being an independent variable as a medium and a dependant variable as peoples' perceptions, but often the multi-dimensionality is disregarded while talking about interactivity.

He goes on with quite comprehensive literature review which he has chosen from the fields of psychology, sociology and computer science/design. The third field which wasn't used in the previous text is psychology. The author implies that mostly the literature handled the term as a technological and communication aspect, there are still studies that see it as perception, and adopt a psychological variable into it. He browses through various categories as communication definitions which primarily focus on computer-mediated communication, and non-communication definitions which take the psychological role in the term.

The fact is that even if the term is connected with technology, one cannot overlook medium structure and human characteristics. Schneiderman, for example, balances technological criteria (system functionality and reliability) with user criteria (time to learn, speed, rate of user error, etc.). (p. 365) The term is mostly described as perceiver-based more than technology-based, although it originally evolves from the latter. Interactivity originates from the machines which the user has to perceive later in order to understand what is going on in the technological base.

As the author goes through a list of definitions, he understands that the major problem is that the term is weakly explained. He then points out various mistakes, mainly concerned with peoples' perceptions with ever-growing technological opportunities. He also suggests that the term itself should be hybrid, because there is no single possibility of creating a term for the word interactivity, because it is perceived from different angles and the fact that technology is constantly changing, the term will change with the new concepts in the studied fields.

In the conclusion he gives a solid definition: "interactivity is 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).", and goes on with the three factors that interactivity is established by: technological structure of the media used (e.g. speed, range, timing flexibility, and sensory complexity), characteristics of communication settings (e.g. third-orderdependency and social presence), and individuals’ perceptions (e.g. proximity, perceived speed, sensory activation, and telepresence) . (p. 379)

The author hopes that more literature will appear concerning the term, but he has done a lot of work in order to get a clear view to the reader about the current status of the term in the year of 2002, which by now has undoubtedly changed due to vast changes in technology and its users.