Media for Interactive Communication

To characterize a system as interactive there must be 3 actions: a statement question request or other message from communicant A to communicant B; a response from B to A based on what A has just said; and a response or reaction from A to B based on Bs response. Of these 3 actions the 2nd and 3rd are always required in interaction. The 1st action is dispensable. Only at the beginning of an interchange is the 1st action necessary or at the start of a new subject of discussion. The remainder of the time the 2 communicants respond to each other. This is the best definition of interactive communication and the one used in this book i.e. interactive communication is the situation in which each of 2 (or more) communicants responds to the other. The essential component of this book is found in part III the section devoted to system design features the issues and problems that characterize these features the analysis of causes for success and failure and design suggestions for future systems. The books 2nd part is an extended section on what is termed "quasi-interactive" media systems. These relatively new systems bring information in alphamerica and graphic form into the home or office transmitted in between the video frames on standard broadcast channels or fed via regular telephone circuits. The interactive media systems described in this section are all based on words either spoken or written. This is because almost the entire content of interactive communication is cognitive and for cognitive information transmission words are the most important means. Thus for the taxonomy the interactive media will be divided between those that are based on the spoken word for which the technical medium of transmission or recording is audio; and the written word the general medium for which is called alphameric. Only the audio media (radio telephone tape and so on) and the alphameric media (telex twx teletype and other telemetry) are often used in their pure and simple form. The 1st audio-based systems to be described in this section are examples of the audiovisual medial combination called television. 2 chapters describe the so-called audio system and another chapter describes the "computer conferencing" alphameric system. The descriptions of example systems provided are brief and factual without evaluation.