Week 3 Reflection – Finding Interactivity

I thought the author was crazy. The use of informal words and phrases jumped me out of my seat (not literally), but it allowed me to picture Crawford as an author because of how expressive the whole chapter is.

Defining interactivity is hard. There is no absolute correct definition for the word that matches its meaning. Beyond his definition that interactivity is a cyclic process where two actors alternately listen, think, and speak, I believe sense is also an important process to add to the definition.

Most stuff that we call ‘interactive’, even in the lower degrees (based on Crawford’s degrees of interactivity), requires human sensory input. Without haptic feedback, some interactivity is gone. Think about phones, computers, or even toys, they require humans to touch, move, and (sometimes) break them for it to be interactive. Although this sounds very ableist, I believe that our senses count as much as the three actions to experience interactivity that Crawford seeks. That human sensory is important to add to the definition of “What is interactive?

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