The Art of Interactive Design

In Chris Crawford’s book, The Art of Interactive Design <https://www.amazon.com/Art-Interactive-Design-Euphonious-Illuminating/dp/1886411840/>`_, Crawford defines interactivity in terms of a conversation. Specifically, interactivity is a cyclical process of two actors taking turns listening, thinking, and speaking.

Unfortunately, the word "Interactive" is often explained or defined poorly, and as a result is poorly understood by our culture. The term gets added to products as a buzzword to make them sound better, but often the objects don’t really "interact" in a way as described by Crawford’s definition. There is no "conversation" or cyclical process.

A literal conversation between two people fits this definition literally, but when the interaction is between a human and an electronic device, the steps become input, process, and output. Key point though is that there are two actors, not one. Each actor is some kind of "purposeful creature," so a wall or a rug cannot be interactive.

It isn’t always clear if something is interactive or not. Rather than being a boolean thing, there are different degrees of interactivity. We can evaluate high or low levels of interactivity by evaluating the quality of the listening, thinking, and speaking steps. Excelling in one area does not compensate for failures in another. A common design error when building interactive products is to fail to appreciate this idea.

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Connected, but Alone

Sherry Turkle is a science and technology professor at MIT who studies the psychology of human relationships with technology. She gave a TED talk in 1996 about how the Internet would teach us about ourselves and help us to live better lives in the real world. In 2012 she gave another TED talk, also about the Internet, but argued that it is changing our lives in ways that we don’t want.

Turkle says that our phones are changing who we are. Behaviors that would have been considered crazy 20 years ago are now commonplace. For example, texting during meetings or conversations. We end up alone when we are with other people. When we are with other people we are also connected to multiple other places.

The sum of many little communications does not add up to one real conversation. Our technologies give us a illusion of friendship and companionship without the burden of actual friendship. We need to learn to be comfortable being alone, [technologically] disconnected from other people. Only when we are alone will we be in touch with ourselves and be able to form real connections with others.

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Study: Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda

After the 2016 election the Columbia Journalism Review published a study of social media sharing patterns for Facebook and Twitter. They wanted to understand how different media outlets informed or misinformed voters on the right and left. Instead of finding people to be in self-reinforcing “filter bubbles” or “echo chambers” that reinforce what people already believe, they found that there were asymmetries in how users on left and right were embracing technology. There was a new right-wing media ecosystem that was much more insular and detached from traditional media sources. On the left there were partisan sites but there were stronger connections to mainstream media.

Going forward journalists need to think about how to build (or rebuild) a basis for the public to form a shared belief about what is happening. A common set of facts is a necessary precursor for civil society to have a constructive debate about public policy issues.

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Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy

Tiziana Terranova is an Italian theorist and activist who writes about the Internet and New Media. In her essay Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy, she writes about the free labor taking place that is critical to the continued functioning of the Internet.

Terranova states that free labor from Internet users is the source of economic value in the digital economy. Free labor is defined as labor that is provided voluntarily, with no remuneration by the beneficiaries. An example of this is the time and effort people put into producing content for YouTube or writing short (or long) messages for Facebook. Internet users seek out these websites specifically to consume the digital content produced by other Internet users. These companies are producing the digital content framework that feeds off of the content and do not produce the actual content themselves.

Free labor and collective knowledge are being voluntarily contributed to capitalist business practices. This essay highlights the essential nature of that free labor to the functioning of the Internet but also refers to it as a “modern sweatshop” or “social factory.”

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Beyond the Mirror World & Surveillance and Capture

Philip Agre is a former professor of information studies at UCLA. He wrote extensively about modern technology and privacy. His work Beyond the Mirror World <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/275283.275285>`_ presents a discussion of data collection and society’s privacy concerns.

Agre defines the mirror world as the world of data. Data is collected from the real world and stored in a database designed by a software engineer. The database contains a representation of the real world, storing characteristics determined by the designer. He points out that the distinction between data objects and the real-life things they represent is being blurred.

This mirror world constructed in a computer can be explored, possibly without the consent of the human beings associated with the being data collected. New strategies for protecting privacy must be developed. Keeping personally identifying information out of databases is critical. Pseudoidentifiers can be used instead, allowing businesses to function and privacy to be protected.

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Societies of Control

Gilles Deleuze was a french philosopher who was friends with Michel Foucault, the philosopher who wrote about discipline and punishment in society. Deleuze expanded on Foucault’s work by describing a control society, a means of control that is the successor to a discipline society.

Foucault’s discipline society was based on physical enclosures such as prisons or schools, or the idealized Panopticon, with people being constantly monitored. In Deleuze’s control society, technology has allowed control to evolve from physical enclosures to one that provides a complex network of human interaction that is constantly monitored. People are free to interact with each other, but only by using the tools the network provides.

An example here is Facebook. We are free to use Facebook as we with but it is actually limited to the provided functionality and thoroughly monitored and analyzed. We cannot re-engineer Facebook as we wish and it is very hard or difficult to leave completely. Another example is our smartphones. We are always connected to the Internet and have access to massive amounts of information, but with a cost. Our phones are constantly collecting data based on our actions. The freedom is less free.

It is difficult or impossible to remove oneself from these mechanisms of control. It is not like removing oneself from a prison, where once a person leaves the prison the mechanism of control is no longer effective.

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