What exactly is interactivity?
Chris Crawfords chapter on “What is Interactivity” was interesting because I had never thought about formally defining interactivity before. Since Crawford was trying to do so, I approached the reading as if I were a skeptic, trying to think of a counter argument to anything that Crawford proposed.
Crawford insists that interaction is the name of the exchange between two actors as they listen, think, and reply to one another. I was about to ask what exactly an “actor” is to Crawford, but he replied not soon after. For him an actor is a “purposeful creature”. This is still a bit unclear to me. Right then he mentions that a fridge that is programmed to “react” to someone opening the door by turning on its light is not what he is considering as an actor, but rather what he wants is “interactivity that has some blood in its veins.” To me this just means that he does not want include entities whose decision-making is too simplistic in his notion of interactivity. Humans are one type of actors that Crawford would accept, and the replies that they can generate are on a spectrum when compared to the refrigerator that can only turn on or off as a reply to an input. As such, Crawford’s definition of interactivity required the actors to have a certain degree of complexity.
Thinking about this for a little bit, I did not find myself disagreeing with this notion. He insists that interaction is different from reaction, and even though I’m taking the skeptic’s position, I will have to agree with him on that. So far, I’ve accepted the notion that interaction needs two actors to listen, think, and reply to one another. However, I thought of moments when I’ve had small talk and conversations without purpose. By this definition, it would seem that such conversations would not be interactive. It seemed a bit counterintuitive that a conversation is non-interactive, but as I thought of this I read through Crawford’s position on the subjectivity of interaction, and his proposed solution to it. He insists that interaction can vary on a spectrum, and that interactivity is just a measure of how much thinking, listening, and replying occurs during an exchange. As if he had read my mind, the example of trivial conversations was one that Crawford used to explain the spectrum of interactivity.
Was the book interactive then? It certainly felt like it. However, by Crawford’s proposed definition it was definitely lower on the scale than an engaging conversation. Although it felt like I was conversing with someone who had just read my mind, the ideas in the chapter were stagnant, unchanging to my thoughts. For a moment they seemed to be a reply to my thoughts, but I know better than that. Still, this gave Crawfords definition a merit in my books.
After going through the entire chapter, I wonder what the epitome of interactivity would look like. One technology that comes to mind is artificial intelligence. I think the reason AI fascinates us is because it is a technology that is much higher on the interactivity scale. When interacting with AI technology it feels as if there is more complex thinking involved in the interaction between us humans and technology. If interactivity is one measure of how good a program is, then is a perfect program one that uses some AI algorithms to tailor its function and form to our needs? If such tailoring is done, then what is the need of specialized programs. When I imagine the peak of interactivity, I think of something without a predetermined form. A single program that is an amalgamation of every possible program but does not have form until it is interacted with.