The Two Views About Interactivity

We’ve been dwelling on Jeff Jarvis‘ remarks about how there was the no interactivity demonstrated in the presentations during the Online News Association‘s panel entitled Engaging Readers with Interactivity. During our trip this week between Chicago and Detroit, we were discussing how Jarvis’ remarks illustrate how members of the online publishing community realize either of two different views of interactivity.

presented on the panel

are given choices

Jarvis uses the second viewpoint: Users conceive the choices by which a (computer-mediated) site can be changed. Not that subtle difference: the users conceive the choices, not the publisher. A discussion room is interactive because you interact with someone. A user playing a game — be it the board game of Monopoly or the computer game SimCity or the sites presented on the ONA panel — isn’t aren’t any more interactive than a mouse running in a maze.

Although both viewpoints fit within Jonathan Steuer’s brilliant, 1990 definition of interactivity (“…the extent to which users can participate in modifying the form and content of a mediated environment in real time“), we believe that Jarvis’ viewpoint is correct because only in it does the user share equal control over his environment. In the game-like interfaces presented at ONA, the publisher holds and sets all the controls.

Consider this: Is the Dallas Morning News‘ editorial blog interactive? It is for its users, the 13 members of the newspaper’s Editorial Board. But it isn’t for the newspaper site’s readers.

What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.