#7 Interactivity

During week seventh we have read an essay of Pierre Levy, where he offers a problematic approach to the concept of interactivity. He also schematizes the different types of interactivity according to the temporal dimension of the mode of interactive communication and the hierarchical relationship between the communicators.

Shown below a summary of his article.

 The term “Interactivity” generally refers to the active participation of the beneficiary of an information transaction but an information receiver could also be ever passive.

Television for example provides only entertainment, meanwhile telephone supplies dialogue, reciprocity, and real communication. Even a classic video game is more interactive than television because the video game reacts to the player’s actions, if we talk about a networked game, that gives the opportunity to let two adversaries play against each other, the similarity between video game and telephone are even more. The massage is a doubled image incorporating the situation and the player: one player transmits to his partner a image of himself that immediately affected the other player.

On the other hand if we analyse a telephone call we know that the message that one speaker send to the other help him to construct an image of his interlocutor and about the situation and the same happen on the contrary. However the information transmitted during the phone call are more limited then in a virtual reality game. The communication through a virtual word in one sense is more interactive than the telephone one because in addition to the message the other person received also the images of the person and the situation. On the other hand the telephone is more interactive because we are put more in touch with the voice of the speaker.

He makes a list of many different criteria that can be used to analyse interactivity:

1)   The ability to appropriate and personalize the received message, regardless of the nature of the message

2)    Reciprocity of the communication

3)     Virtuality, here understood in term of the processing of the message in real time based on a model and input data.

4)    The incorporation of the image of the participants in the message

5)    Telepresence

Each individual communication system be subjected to precise analysis and is becoming more and more necessary a map of the modes of communication as a political, cultural, economic, social and educational issue.

#6 Consumer society and advertising

On the 6^th weeks we talked about “consumer society and advertising”.

To talk about that we should start from the Industrial Revolution, when the technological developments radically altered the organization of production, distribution and consumption of goods. For these reasons the Industrial Revolution had massive effects on politics, economics, culture, educations and society. The exponential increase in non-essential goods and consumption entailed the rise of the professional advertising industry. ( McStay, A. (2009/2012) “ Consumer Society and Advertising,” in Long, P.; Wall, T; Bakir, V. & McStay, A. Media Studies: Texts, Production and Context. London: Pearson Education.)

The mass advertising industry emerged to notifying consumers about products, developing sophisticated techniques for inducing desires and needs among ordinary people for things that hitherto they did not relies they needed. Its purpose is to persuade people to purchase, subscribe to or consume a particular brand, product, service or organization.( McStay, A. (2009/2012) “ Consumer Society and Advertising,” in Long, P.; Wall, T; Bakir, V. & McStay, A. Media Studies: Texts, Production and Context. London: Pearson Education.)

Advertising was and continue to be a key driver for commercial media, facilitating by the grow of press, radio, television, movies and digital media.

I would like to talk about the newest kind of advertisement: the viral marketing.

The first example of viral marketing hail from 4 July 1996 when Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia, Hotmail founder, decided to write at the end of every e-mail this message “PS Get your free e-mail account at http://www.hotmail.com." This message appeared as a suggestion from the sender and the result was that Hotmail reached 8,2 million of users in 18 months. (http://www.nobrandagency.com/articoli-marketing/marketing-virale-nobrand.pdf).

Viral marketing, viral advertising, or marketing buzz are buzzwords referring to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networking services and other technologies to try to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of viruses or computer viruses. (Wikipedia)

Thanks to the viral advertising agencies reduced their costs on media by asking consumers to spread their messages for them and gain credibility by getting friends to share their content. Viral messages are typically humorous, original, due to ease a production and dissemination across newer forms of media.

The fact that they are forwarded between peers means that they use advertising to create their online identities.( McStay, A. (2009/2012) “ Consumer Society and Advertising,” in Long, P.; Wall, T; Bakir, V. & McStay, A. Media Studies: Texts, Production and Context. London: Pearson Education.)

There are many different kind of viral marketing, the most common are videos, and some of them have become really popular. I searched online the list of the most popular viral video of the last year, they are very different but the aim of every one is to affect the viewer for something special: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/6649/10-Examples-of-Amazing-Viral-Marketing-Videos.aspx

Another very common think is monitoring consumers and their activities in real time as they use media, media companies track your movement online to deliver a more personalized and individual experience. This is called data mining.( McStay, A. (2009/2012) “ Consumer Society and Advertising,” in Long, P.; Wall, T; Bakir, V. & McStay, A. Media Studies: Texts, Production and Context. London: Pearson Education.)

This means that I will found in each page I will visit advertisement about some I’ve searched before in another website. Many people thought that online tracking technologies compromise our individual privacy but others affirm that tracking tools help streamline daily life.( McStay, A. (2009/2012) “ Consumer Society and Advertising,” in Long, P.; Wall, T; Bakir, V. & McStay, A. Media Studies: Texts, Production and Context. London: Pearson Education.)