I found the principle of interactivity to be an interesting subject. Manovich’s assertion number 6 categorizes New Media as “interactive. In contract to old media where the order of presentation is fixed, the user can now interact with a media object.” This is misleading. The term interactive reflects action between two forms. The manner of interaction does not even have to admit humans. We are mislead with respect to the idea of ‘old media being fixed’ not being considered as interactive. The industrial era printed numerous newspapers, set up neighborhood bulletin boards and used word of mouth to spread news and important topics and all these forms included interaction, especially with John Q. Public.
We could always interact with the media object, whether it was radio, telegraph, or letter writing. Did not the manner of ‘Smoke Signals’ involve some elbow grease and interaction with fire and smoke (This is not meant as a joke, so please do not take offense)? When Television was invented it was ‘New Media’ without any consideration of the label, yet families gathered many evenings to be informed and entertained. The only difference was that this was not categorized as interactivity as it reflected media.
Associating the newest wave of technological advances including Internet, Satellite/Digital TV, Satellite Radio and GPS (and our personal cellular ‘tracking device’) as interactive is more of a marketing plan than it is an actual truth. Introducing the interactive title is marketing’s attempt to brand the connective abilities of these devices, basically in order to increase the bottom line price point. Technology today has many features compared to previous, outdated components. Between websites, cable/digital channels and cellphone, uh, smartphones, our ways of personalizing communication and functionality has increased in ridiculous ways. However, interactivity was not recently invented as the newest form of linking these tools. Apparently, it has been around since the proverbial ‘Caveman and his club’. Interactivity, with respect to new media, has only been enhanced due to technological innovation.
Interactivity is a tricky idea, generally speaking and as you indicate here. McLuhan would say, for example, that TV is very much interactive in the way in which it engages the viewer and there are many theorists who would argue that reading is a kind of dialogue between the reader and the text. We tend to think of activities like watching TV or reading as passive — that we simply absorb the images on the screen or the words on the text. We could make the argument that these types of things are interactive in a very different, very fundamental way — that we must “interact” with media in order to make meaning.