Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Transcription conventions
- Part One Key issues in analysing media discourse
- Part Two Representation and interaction
- 5 Simulated interaction
- 6 Interpersonal meaning in broadcast texts: representing social identities and relationships
- 7 Production communities and audience communities
- 8 Interactivity
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Interactivity
from Part Two - Representation and interaction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Transcription conventions
- Part One Key issues in analysing media discourse
- Part Two Representation and interaction
- 5 Simulated interaction
- 6 Interpersonal meaning in broadcast texts: representing social identities and relationships
- 7 Production communities and audience communities
- 8 Interactivity
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
As we enter an era of interactive media technology, the interface between media texts and audience is transforming, including new ways of accessing content and new possibilities for social engagement in a virtual environment, be it radio, television, the (still) largely written mode of the Internet, or a combination of all three. The late Roger Silverstone reflected that
our [twentieth] century has seen the telephone, film, radio, television become both objects of mass consumption and essential tools for the conduct of everyday life. We are now confronted with the spectre of a further intensification of media culture, through the global growth of the Internet and the promise (some might say the threat) of an interactive world in which nothing and no one cannot be accessed, instantly.
(Silverstone 1999: 4)A convenient example of this, for me, is a university website providing contact details for staff. It is now common to be contacted by students worldwide, not just those at the same university. This generates a sense of being a globally available ‘amenity’, a phenomenon that can be experienced as an imposition or a pleasure in equal measure. But the Internet also offers such amenities as interactive maps, downloadable music resources on demand and so on. The notion of ‘interactivity’ raises interesting issues of definition (see, for example, Christensen 2003, Downes and McMillan 2000, Jensen 1999, Schultz 2000). Here, I am understanding it not primarily it in terms ofenhanced content and access, but as social interaction. This final chapter turns to interactivity between members of audience communities and members of production communities: the reality and the rhetoric.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Media DiscourseRepresentation and Interaction, pp. 154 - 174Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007