How Interactivity adds an Extra Dimension to the Internet

How Interactivity is the true power of the Internet
(and journalists who don't get it are killing the web)

By Peter Johnston, Challenging-concepts.com, #challengethink, socialprocess.co.uk.

If you ask people why the internet has made a difference to their lives you’ll get a lot of answers. But they boil down to three things – knowledge, connection and interactivity.

Knowledge is the obvious one. No more trips to the library or bookstore – a dozen versions of the “facts” just a swish away. No need for books, directories, maps newspapers or magazines. A thousand songs in your pocket. Every “water-cooler” conversation, buying decision or business meeting is quite simply better informed than it was.

The effect of democratising knowledge is far deeper. We bought into the idea that teachers knew stuff. If we paid a University and invested 3 years of our life, one day we would know stuff too. Professors were up there with cleanliness in the next to God stakes. Knowledge has been power for centuries. Now Academia is like the church before the reformation – exposed as hoarding knowledge as power and holding us back. We have our own knowledge, on every subject and wherever we go.

Connection is even more powerful. Regardless of colour, creed, sex or status. Global, democratic, free. You can connect with every single person with the same interest as you. People who have done stuff you want to, know stuff you want to or own stuff you want to. Pick up new knowledge here, a different perspective there, a caveat elsewhere. Connect with people with an opinion on your subject, whoever and wherever they are. Learn how they think – and why they think differently from you. Multiple views give us a multi-faceted picture, moving our knowledge from two dimensions into three.

Interaction adds a powerful fourth dimension – the power to improve the original idea. Dance and play together with the mental images it creates. Ask questions to check understanding. Test things. Examine alternatives. Kolb proved only a quarter of people learn by listening – the rest by questioning, putting forward their own thoughts and testing ideas in practice. Two-way communication improves both parties’ knowledge and expertise. Collaboration builds an understanding greater than any single person came in with - more complex thoughts can be created and worked on together, then thoroughly debugged and tested for resonance.

On the Gluu.biz collaboration platform, we regularly see the astonishing social effect interaction has. People come to their sessions sullen, disengaged, negative. Then they start to collaborate. They discover their views are valued. Open up. Along the way, they begin to understand why the others think as they do, the constraints they are under, the performance indicators they are watching. By the end everyone is working as a big team, sharing ideas, considering the effects on each-other and driving things forward.

Interaction qualifies too, digging underneath, in search of the real truth. Separating original thinking and thinkers from those who follow others, without ideas and opinions of their own. It exposes the raw passion - and allows people to be infected. Builds powerful emotional bonds between like minds and hammers out respect between opponents. Interaction turns two dimensional “author” bylines into living, breathing individuals.

This nexus of knowledge, connection and interaction is leading to the greatest boom in ideas in history. Billions of people flowing in torrents over invisible barriers of class, sex and circumstance, smashing down the walls around knowledge and building powerful relationships across national boundaries.

But there is a fly in the ointment. Journalism. Douglas Adams put it this way...

“During the 20th century we were dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – performers and audience there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence. History will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration; ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’”

People accepted that restrictive broadcast way of things. It built on school’s “listen to the teacher”. The Broadcast era raised nations of followers, unable to think for themselves. People who parrot what they think is the right answer, rather than engaging in debate to find a better one. We even have a word for it – an audience – someone who listens.

Broadcast also created a false power structure. Messengers were confused with message. Broadcasters gained celebrity status. This encouraged the egotistic mindset of “my views are more important than theirs” and “I’m an expert”. It also reinforced the old idea that, once voiced, an idea is a fixed, unchangeable utterance from on high. Once broadcast, it becomes immutable, unchallengeable “fact”.

Broadcast messages, however, are really only unformed 2D ideas. One person’s views. Nothing without an audience. Connection makes the words and images jump off the screen and take shape as ideas in people’s heads. Interactivity then allows people to take those ideas and examine them from all angles, add to them, reject them, combine them with others or hone the idea into a better one. This effectively takes the unformed base image and gilds and embellishes it, or builds it into a greater structure. Those important extra dimensions of peer acceptance and peer review.

But journalists see none of this. When you have only a hammer everything is a nail, to build the edifice of “I write, you read, we sell advertising”. The blog, which was supposed to initiate a two-way interaction, has been turned into an “I say” medium. The ethos is an arrogant “Me, Me, Me” – “I know this stuff - I’m important, not you”. The words are designed to discourage interaction – not to start a conversation, but to kill it in its tracks. No wonder the comments they do receive are negative.

That throws away two thirds of the power of the internet. Turns it back into being a flat magazine-style 2D medium for distributing information. Without comments, blogs are just articles. Where’s the connection – the step which links it with people emotionally. No empathy, or “I like your thinking too!” bond to create or build a two-way relationship. No opportunity for interactivity either, arrogantly shutting out all the other thoughts from all the other people who could help build something better.

Some people are comfortable with that. The head of Sky News has hailed it as a new golden age for journalism. Led by Sonia Simone at Copyblogger, across the world journalists are turning off comments on their blogs, severing their connections with a host of intelligent readers who could be the source of new articles, better research and innovative ideas. Turning the powerful and emotional “collaborator” connection into the much less powerful journalist-reader “take or leave it” connection.

It gets worse. A journalist in the US, Joe Pulizzi, packaged and promotes “content marketing”. His “every company should be a publisher” message plays to the ego of copywriters who look up to journalists and editors and marketers who want to craft their company's message. Just as marketers started to work out how to engage with buyers and learn what they were thinking, he turned marketing back into an advertising style “talk-at” medium. Marketers and companies across the western world are investing billions into Pulizzi’s backward step.

Corporations, organisations and governments are pushing people away. Sending this strong subliminal message which says “we only want your money – we don’t actually want to know you”. People are getting that message. And responding - collaborating with eachother, leaving companies out of the loop. Taking the view that “if my views aren’t important to them, then why should their views be important to me?”

A chasm is opening up between people and the organisations which serve them. Until organisations stop treating the internet as just knowledge and learn how to use it to connect and interact, they will widen that chasm. It will end in tears.

So let’s start with one simple change. Don’t just re-connect comments on your blogs. Teach yourself to write those blogs so they start a conversation and invite comments and collaboration towards a better idea than you started with. You might surprise yourself with the results. As the artist Ralph Steadman put it “The power of my art is that I don’t know what’s there until I do it.”

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