I had to take a pause in the reading to chuckle about the time and effort that seemed to be going into just defining the term interactivity. I suppose with the abundance of “new media” definitions it would only make sense that researchers would debate the definitions of the research that goes into it. But after reading through they all seemed to make sense with just small degrees of variance between them. My personal hang-up came with the term “real time.” In what I would consider to be interactive, real time does not seem to be as important as the users ability to connect in some way with a particular medium. In Spiro Kiousis’ article he starts off by talking about the confusion embedded in and surrounding the concept of interactivity and the subsequent problems it raises in research (Kiousis). Within his article the definition I found that most mimicked my concept of interactivity came from Jensen: as 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 (1998: 201). To me interactivity is all about the users (audience of a particular medium) ability to change, enhance or even participate in a particular medium. Radio and television are constantly reminding viewers and listeners to pick-up their cell phone when they “see news happening.” Or asking commuters to report traffic problems during the commute. These two mediums especially are looking to get audiences involved. Television has viewer-produced images for their websites news broadcasts, and radio sets up contests for listeners to submit CDs or DVDs to win prizes. I believe that ultimately the ability for this interaction goes back to the technology of the 1s and 0s and the ability for the ease of such media to be produced and transmitted. Of course the ability to interact with each other via cell phones, email, chat-rooms, message boards and texts is common, my concept also involves the interaction between audience members and media as a whole.
In the Downes and McMillan article Defining Interactivity, Steur offers interactivity ‘as the extent to which users can participate in modifying the form and content of a mediated environment in real time.’ In my opinion the only flaw is the phrase ‘real time.’ One of the luxuries of interactivity is the users ability to interact with the medium on his/her own time. On-demand, Tivo or even answering an email offers the user a chance to time shift the content to better meet the users demands or needs. In fact one of the findings from the interviews they conducted in their research stated that a key issue seems to be that participants have some control over the timing of messages in computer-based interactive environments (Downes & McMillan).
According to Dr. Grimes at Texas State, television stations are currently seeking new and different ways for their properties to become more interactive with viewers. From previous lectures with Dr. Grimes he states that ad brokers like GSD&M in Austin have already begun to shift ad money away from television and place that money in Internet advertising. Television programmers and station management have been left with figuring out how they can make a static viewing medium into a more dynamic interactive format.
The idea and connection I sensed between interactivity and The Long Tail was: people want what they want when they want it. For me, one attribute of interactivity is the ability to log on to my computer, find what I’m looking for and buy it, whether it is a book, movie, music or scuba gear. Anderson does a good job of describing The Long Tail, my interpretation is those data points that lie on the fringes of a perfect Bell curve, the outliers. The connection between The Long Tail and interactivity seems to be simple. The people that connect to their favorite shopping portal, Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, or any other service will be introduced to similar items to the item they are searching. This offers the consumer choices that may relate to them based on the initial choice. And once again, going back to the 1s and 0s of the digital realm, it allows the supplier to store the songs or movies that may be purchased only once or twice a month. Due to the size of storage Blockbuster could not store that amount of material, digital storage does. This ability to store countless, fringe titles, opens up an entire market to interactive users that did not exist before. As more and more mediums become interactive and more and more users interact with media the market for new consumers is almost endless. Radio stations and television stations could do the same thing from home pages, offering audiences the chance to click on an artist or program and be offered similar choices and open up an archive of material for consumers.
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