I found myself very entertained by this piece. Crawford’s tone was serious yet unserious, and his examples and references were quite funny to me. I was very shocked over the language and way he framed his words, but I’m not complaining about his writing style at all since it made it way easier for me to read and digest his points. The Boolean property comparison made my jaw drop.
After reading his piece, I learned that what he considers to be the characteristics of a strongly interactive system is the mutual ability to alternately listen, think, and speak. I do somewhat agree with this to an extent after reading his examples of what isn’t interactive, but I also feel like context, intention, interest, and bias of one party can play a much bigger role on how “interactive” something may be viewed as. For example, the difference between a little kid stumbling across your interactive portfolio website could find it to be a higher degree of interactivity than if a professor assigned her students to collectively view and critique the interactive portfolio. The student may have reasonings like jealousy or carelessness that could cause them to find the portfolio as “not interactive enough” because it doesn’t speak out to them. Meanwhile, the little kid might be fascinated with how this portfolio is basically like a short video game.
Just like a conversation, both sides must be interested in one another for it to flow, otherwise, it would be very one-sided and unwanted. There needs to be proper and authentic involvement and engagement between the two. This ties in with the author’s point of the different degrees of interactivity, rather than a concept of “one or the other.”
I find it really interesting how he exposed companies for claiming their products as “interactive” when they are just the same product. The word being tossed around so often under so many different meanings seemed to tick off the author.
Some very brief ideas I had to improve the degree of user interaction was to make my work intriguing from the get go. People’s attention spans have gone down so much, especially with the usage of social media, so I would have to grab their attention immediately if I want them to, in turn, willingly interact with my work. Another improvement would be to find a creative way to “bring out” the interactivity by viewing my piece in several possible lenses to get an assumption of how other people may react to it given their point of view. I’d like to increase the visual and auditory appeal of my work, and to also create content that is for more than one audience group. By this, I mean making it interactive so that it’ll listen and respond to other people’s interests to in turn, maintain and even increase their level of interaction and interest.