anja's blog

The debate about the interactivity is older than one might think, for already at the beginning of the century, intellectuals such as Bertol Brecht and Walter Benjamin worried about the limited one-way direction of the new (at the time) electronic media and worked on an agenda of democratization (Schultz, 2000). Many years later, Jürgen Habermas (in Schultz, 2000) was still pointing out the lack of interaction in mass media that were constantly subject to the criticism because of their power and centralization. Today the technological development has taken the opposite direction and has led us to new possibilities of communication so that suddenly we have more opportunities to interact and participate in the public sphere (some would say these possibilities improve democracy) than we are able to deal with.
As Cover (2006) suggests and deeply analyses in his article, the traditional author-text-audience relationship is being redefined, for now the audiences have a great capacity to change, alter and manipulate a text. At some point he refers to such advanced interactivity as a struggle for control over the authorial “purity” and “aunthenticity” of the text and even as a war between media creators/industries and audience participation. I do agree that the questions of authorship, audiences and text may represent a problem in the development of these new media technologies (and consequently in our society) and that we have to find some regulations and solutions in order to prevent it getting completely out of hands but at the same time I dare to say that in my opinion Cover’s fear might be a little bit exaggerated.
I do not deny the fact that nowadays it is possible for everybody to express their views and opinions, to share their beliefs, give non-mainstream voices (which is often anything but negative), participate in a public debate (Gauntlett, 2004) ... We could even say that in a way we are now being part of a global public sphere which not only enables us to publish whatever we have to say but also to consume whatever everyone else have to say. That, however, means that suddenly we find ourselves in a chaos of information and that another problem might occur elsewhere than Cover was suggesting. He did not take into the consideration the scarce and the most valuable resourse in the new era, which everybody on the web is struggling for - attention (Goldhaber in Gauntlett 2004). As Schultz (2000) suggests: “The greater the number of communicators, the less time everyone has to listen to others; the smaller the size of interacting groups, the smaller their significance for society as a whole”. He continues with a thought that with a growing number of information and communication forums, some central sources may become more important. I do agree with Cover that the empowerment of audience represents a threat to media industries and to existing institutions but I also think that we have to look at the problem from a broader point of view. In this aspect, I find the following thought of Schultz (2000) quite meaningful: “Communication and participation alone do not mean much in terms of quality and value of content. Also, communication can remain without any significant effects as long as it is not transformed into communicative power and effective decisions”.

Literature:
- Gauntlett, D. (2004). Introduction. D. Gauntlett, R. Horsley: Web.Studies, 2nd Edition. London: Hodder Arnold
- Cover, R. (2004). Audience inter/active: Interactive media, narrative control and reconceiving audience history. New Media & Society, 8(1): 139–158.
- Schultz, T. (2000). mass media and the concept of interactivity: an exploratoty studiy of online forums and reader email. Media, Culture&Society, vol. 22: 205-221.