Interactivity posting

By far the most interesting reading was on the long tail. The niche market is definitely where the money is at and with better and better programs searching for an individual's biases, has provided an increasingly accurate target in which to make profits from consumers. I would only expect more of this to occur and the ones that will do the best will have it all, from the big pop culture to the obscure garage band or the Penn State t-shirts to UT-Pan American mugs. The future that Anderson writes about that I can picture best is one of us telling the radio what song to play and then either hearing an ad or subscribing to a satellite service that will find it for us.

  

Berners-Lee shows how the world wide web portion of the Internet was created and the initial steps that released it to the world. I wonder if he gets geek groupies...

Spiro and Kiousis surmise that interactivity is a product of media and psychology, a factor that depends on the technology, context, bias, perception and degree of interaction per individual user.

To make the definition more confusing, we have McMillan, Sally, Downes and Edward that interview 10 people who work in interactive communication to define the term on six dimensions through what becomes an even more complicated and abstract terminology. They conclude that interactivity is based on the direction of communication, time flexibility, sense of place, level of control, responsiveness and perceived purpose of communication. 

I actually liked what the book had to say in regards to the definition of new media being forms that integrate and possess advances in interactivity. The last part of the chapter briefly discusses the web as an extension of capitalism, western culture and corporate globalism.  The Internet is as interactive in terms of communication as we've come - and I can't wait to see what they come up with next.