Interactivity

We can find a similar account of simulation’s sex appeal in the rise of multimedia computing, particularly for websites. Here the measure of computing power is most often presented in terms of “interactivity.” Yet formal assessments for interactivity, as could be produced through the Chomsky hierarchy, are never brought to bear. To understand this, it is useful to first examine similar questions about the assessment of intricate behavior in simple biological organisms. Spiders are not taught how to spin a web; the behavior is genetically programmed. Even semi- learned behaviors such as bird songs are often characterized as the result of a “serial pattern generator.” Tightly sequenced behaviors such as spider webs and bird songs can be modeled as finite state automata, because they require little adaptive interaction with their environment. They may appear to be complicated but they are in fact a “preprogrammed” sequence of actions. This stands in strong contrast to animal behaviors that require spontaneous interaction, as we see for example in the social cooperation of certain mammals (wolves, orca, primates, etc.). Even lone animals can show this kind of deep interactivity: A raccoon learning to raid lidded trash cans is clearly not clocking through a sequence of prepared movements.

In the same way, our interactions with websites can vary from “canned” interactions with a limited number of possible responses—pressing on various buttons resulting in various image or sound changes—to truly interactive experiences in which the user explores constructions in a design space or engages in other experiences with near- infinite variety. Such deep interactivity does not depend on the sophistication of the media. The 1970s video game of Pong, with its primitive low- resolution graphics, has far greater interactivity than a website in which a button press launches the most sophisticated 3- D fl y-though animation. As Fleischmann points out in his analysis of web media, rather than measure interactivity in terms of two- way mutual dependencies, commercial claims for interactivity depend on an “interrealism effect” that substitutes flashy video streaming or other one- way gimmicks for user control of the simulation. Such multimedia attempts to create the effect of interactive experience without relinquishing the producer’s control over the simulation. At least speed, for all its elitist ownership, has a quantitative measure that allows us to compare machines; for interactivity we have only the rhetoric of public relations. Even in cases in which we are not duped by this interrealism effect, and strive for deep interactivity, the informational limits of interactive computing power (the bandwidth of the two- way communication pipeline) is carefully doled out in accordance to social standing, with the most powerful using high- speed fiberoptic conduits of Internet II, lesser citizens using cable connections on Internet I, and the poorest segments of society making do with copper telephone wires—truly a “trickle- down” economy of interactivity.

~ Ron Eglash, 2008