Do the Interactive

Tired of the word "interactive" yet? I sure am.

A commercial for a software company sells its "interactive software." Programs are considered to be interactive if they have a point-and-click interface. CD-ROMs are considered to be interactive media because of the amount of options its storage capacity allows. Interactive narrative is new buzzword in scriptwriting classes, the idea that one can write a story that allows to reader to carve his or her own path through the piece. A local discussion group announces that it wants it talks to be interactive, a new phrase supposedly meaning the desire for audience participation.

Not enough interactivity for you? Try this one on for size:

Late one night as I was having an interactive dream, an interactive elf came into my interactive house and interacted with my interactive dog. Then, as I awoke suddenly and rudely by my noisy interactive alarm clock, I interacted with my small device by flicking the interactive switch to read "off." As I rolled out of my interactive bed I stumbled into the bathroom to grab my interactive tooth brush and proceeded to have it interact with my teeth. "Zowie," I said as I looked back at my interactive time-piece, "I'm late for work!" Jumping into my interactive clothes I made a bee-line for my newly redesigned interactive car and drove to work, where I found my boss interacting with my other co-workers, and having looked at me puzzled, announced finally, "What are you doing here? I thought I gave you the day off today. Interact home."

Enough already. I'm having an interactive meltdown.

All joking aside, the abuse of the word "interactive" is yet another symptom of our culture's inability to deal with the massive wave of change that new media is sweeping upon us. It is an "unword", a old term that usually gets redefined in an effort to describe a new movement or occurrence, gets hyper-marketed to the culture like crazy, but when one attempts to pinpoint an actual definition for the term, one is usually left to the conclusion that it means very little after all. Unwords have their power of cultural spread via slick marketing campaigns that use it as adjectives to describe products and services that may have nothing to do with the product itself ("virtual" is another example of an unword).

Ever since early man learned to make the wheel, humans have always had a particular relationships with their tools, which occur on various levels of sophistication. In present-day terms, you would never think that your relationship with a virtual environment would be the same as your relationship with your TV remote controller. The VR environment is a complex world that demands more, and hence offers the realization of more rewards; it has the potential to be sensual, you must become more aware of your own senses in order to maintain your co-relationship. Would you ever think that you relate would to a virtual space in the same way that you relate to a telephone? Probably not. Are they both interactive media? Well, yes.

And hence lies the problem. We have now apparently lumped all levels of human-technology interaction into a convenient little phrase called "interactivity", without attempting to expand our language to distinguish the difference between the complex array of relationships that each of these technologies ensue.

This point may seem a little esoteric to some, but consider this: Sociologists will tell you that if you want to get a good understanding of a culture, you should first look at its language. Our language hasn't yet been able to catch up to the complexities of our technology. The abuse of "interactive" and other such terms indicate that our technology is advancing faster than our vocabulary's ability to properly describe it. What does that in turn say about our understanding of its impact on our lives?

One of my favourite episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation is one where The Enterprise encounters an alien ship adrift in space. Having made contact with its crew, it was discovered that despite the high advancement of the stranded ship's technology, its crew didn't have the cognitive ability to understand the ship's workings, and their vocabulary reflected this. It was later discovered they had acquired the technology by stealing it. They would endlessly wander around, muttering things to Captain Picard and crew like, "We are lost. You are smart. Make us go."

We are lost. You are smart. Make us go.

Mark J. Jones - ed.