In this chapter, I like how the author made his argument very clear to the lay audience who just started to think about interactive programming. Crawford showed in a very general, yet critical way what he considers and doesn’t consider being interactive. Nevertheless, I believe this chapter was biased toward the author’s subjective opinion about the definition of interactivity. This may be seen in most of his examples. Specifically, I want to point out the example of the books and how our reading cannot be interactive. I would oppose this argument by giving another example: interactive books. Recently, a new genre of books has been introduced, which is a gamebook. These books share similarities with conventional books, but they demand the active involvement of the reader by prompting decisions that influence the story’s progression. There are also digital versions that require the reader to shake or blow on the phone so that something would happen on the screen of a phone. I believe, this is a great example of an interactive book, which doesn’t support the argument of the author. You can check an app for this type of book here.
One thing I really liked about this chapter is Crawford’s association of interactive programming with human conversation. As we think about coding, specifically the interactive things we do in class, it fully qualifies for interactive artwork. However, I believe that no matter what computers do interactively, it is a human who stands as the main actor in the whole process. So, in this chapter, Crawford is limited to the concept of interaction within the computer and programs, but he does not mention who takes the initial control of the whole interactive process.