May 12th, 2008
Douglas Adams on Interactivity
by Joshua Porter | 
12 Comments | shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/767
As anybody who has ever read anything knows, the most important part of a book are the quotes sprinkled throughout it. Yes, if you are able to pick the perfect quotes to start your chapters with, then you’ve done the majority of hard work in writing. The words that you write yourself, the other 50,000 or so marks on paper that fill in the spaces between the quotes, well, those are mostly there to give the sense that you did something on your own. But the quotes, the quotes, those are the show!
On that note, I thought I would start talking about my book Designing for the Social Web by sharing the first quote in it. It’s a quote from what is undoubtedly one of the top 5 pieces written by anybody on the subject of the Internet. It’s from Douglas Adams’ 1999 piece: How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet
“During [the twentieth] century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport—the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.
I expect that history will show “normal” mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘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?’
“Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.”
“What was the Restoration again, please, miss?”
“The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.”
I put this quote at the beginning of the book because it completely rewires the way we think about the Web. It is a new technology, sure, but the primary power of it is to enable interactivity…a return to interactivity that we’ve been slowly eroding with other forms of technology. As we design web-based interactive systems, it’s nice to know that we’re not conjuring value out of thin air…we’re simply returning to tried and true forms of human communication.
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Comments
1. Justin Thorp 7:54am, Mon 12th, 2008
It’s a great quote. Just got my copy of your book. I’m anxious to dig into it.
2. Jonathan 8:09am, Mon 12th, 2008
Clay Shirky has recently expounded about this too, and makes a similar point about how people relate to media.
3. Amitabh Handa 9:16am, Mon 12th, 2008
Nice quote, Josh. Sure, we “interact” with a browser/computer/etc, but that is only a medium for the true interaction, which is between the people using the technology itself. Makes me wonder how people initially described non-interactive (“normal”) media when it debuted over a century ago.
4. Jonathan 10:43am, Mon 12th, 2008
@Amitabh: Part of the point of the Adams quote is that non-interactive media never “debuted” – it just came about from the evolution of old media. So eventually we ended up seeing interactive media via the Internet as somehow new when in fact it was very old. Shirky’s point goes further: non-interactive media has served a specific social purpose in the industrial age, and age which we are now seeing coming to an end.
5. Jonathan 11:10am, Mon 12th, 2008
Oh and incidentally, Charles Leadbeater’s new book “We Think” also states that ancient, pre-industrial modes of human interaction are being re-discovered on the Internet as well. It’s a bit of a meme right now it seems.
6. Graham Strong 2:04pm, Mon 12th, 2008
If anyone would know, it would be DA. I still believe that he was so far ahead of his time that even *he* didn’t know he’d envisioned the Internet with his ubiquitous guide… (Though he rightly predicted a time when digital watches would no longer be cool…)
Communication technology over the ages has always been a replacement for face-to-face interaction between two (or more) people. The goal is to mimic in-person interaction while negating the factor of distance.
For example, although the telegraph allowed two people to communicate (relatively) quickly over thousands of miles, the drawback is that you couldn’t interact in real time, communications were subject to misinterpretation, etc.
Even the telephone is not the same as face-to-face — but it is a lot closer.
The Internet takes us yet another step closer. We can view each other’s computers, watch the same YouTube video, comment on each other’s blogs. I could be on a sailboat off the coast of the Galapagos, and you could be stationed at the South Pole. But we would still have a reasonable facsimile of face-to-face interactivity.
But no matter how improved the technology gets, will it ever replace the direct human contact of a handshake or a hug?
~Graham
7. Josh 3:09pm, Mon 12th, 2008
@Amitabh: interesting distinction between interacting with software and interacting with other people…I think we often get these confused in some way.
@Jonathan: Thanks for the pointer to Leadbeater’s book…will have to check that out.
@Graham: Thanks for the nice comment, Graham! You give us a nice summary of technology and interaction…I recently read that the inverted pyramid style of writing may have emerged from the telegraph and it’s limitations…you had to get the most important bits of the message over first, in case the entire thing didn’t go through.
8. interaction design 11:03am, Sun 18th, 2008
Hi Josh,
Interesting quote you got there and I liked the comment of Graham (#8) a lot too. He ends with the question if internet can ever replace a direct hug or handshake? Maybe not? But I sure can image that we can exchange emotions through the internet in some time. Computer will be able to translate emotions or feelings, take the Philips Ambilight for instance. If we succeed in translating our emotions into the right set of ’sound’ ‘touch’ ‘colours’ and maybe even ’smell’ that might be possible!?