The interactivity of true two-way communications is what serves as the empowering and enabling feature of this expanding technology. Interactivity—and open access—empowers people to make their own choices, and it enables them to make their own opinions and knowledge known.
The globally distributed databases and search tools of the Internet allow people the option of retrieving and publishing the information they want, when they want. While this occasionally may be a colorized 40’s musical, the overall percentages of this market are projected to be fairly small (Wired, 2.09). Interactivity should cause the couch potato to become a dying breed as the rest of the world surges ahead.
As an aside, surging ahead is exactly what’s going on. While Internet growth was only doubling every few years for a little over 20 years—now celebrating its 25th year—the Internet has been doubling in size yearly for the past few years.
For both individuals and businesses, the two-way communications is what enables the Internet to act as a support vehicle in a couple of different senses.
For individuals, this two-way support channel underlies the give and take of the free flow of both information and feedback. People can ask for and receive advice and support on everything from computer problems to coping with runaway children.
The computer mediated communication of e-mail and newsgroups (in FidoNet, NetMail and Echos, respectively) is still the overwhelmingly #1 choice of what to do in CyberSpace. People are talking, and care enough about something, to keep the conversations going—the particular topic is almost irrelevant.
This free flow of information is also what enables businesses to define markets and refine products. Companies can keep a record of what customers are saying about their own and competitors’ products and services. The customer support arm of a company can field pre- and post-sales queries from a community that likes to ask questions first, and will give matter-of-fact feedback.
This feedback is often to a company’s advantage. Satisfied customers usually do an excellent job of both pitching a product and helping other customers. In many of the technically oriented newsgroups I follow regularly, questions are answered by about a 4 to 1 ratio of customers to actual company support personnel. There are support conferences for products whose manufacturers don’t even exist anymore.
Not only has communication become computer mediated, but so has much of the manufacturing and production processes. As companies sometimes try frantically to keep up with the pace of technology, frequent and sometimes overlapping software and hardware upgrades throw schedules into disarray.
Engineering change notices, software bug fixes and workarounds all benefit from the interactivity of CyberSpace. Problems can be reported and fixes applied almost simultaneously, i.e. in real-time.
And this fills in the other side of the support coin. The interactivity of CyberSpace can be used to satisfy your own needs while you help satisfy the needs of others. Because interactivity implies sharing, I take this as a positive sign, indeed.
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dave@reststop.net