The Role of Interactivity in My Life

In my personal opinion Interactivity is an interesting topic to discuss because most people, if not all, meet interactive media all the time throughout the day. My life related to interactivity since I born, and even now I want to get a job in this field. Basically, interactivity is everything that surrounds us, it’s all about communication, environment, technology, and information. Every day growing up I was learning or playing within interactivity, whether its watching cartoons, reading the book or playing “Minecraft” on my mothers old desktop.

Every day waking up I start my day with playing some music, scrolling my Instagram feed and watching videos while drinking coffee, then on my way to college I listen to some fresh podcasts from my influencers, arriving at college I communicate with schoolmates and professors while learning a lot of different software, after school I usually play video games with my friend from New York or speaking to my mother in Ukraine, and finally I’m setting up my daily goals in “ToDoist” app before going to sleep. From things listed above, it is clear that interactivity has a huge impact on me, I was already born when there was TVs, phones, e-mail… and I can’t tell what my life would be like if there were no such media tools around me. To make the more clear observation on how interactivity changed peoples habits and way they communicate let's take my 90 years old grand grandmother as an example. My grand-grandmother Galina was born in 1928, Talne, USSR (the First prototype of electronic television was invented in 1927 by 21-year-old Philo Taylor Farnsworth).

When she was young they didn’t even have a radio at their house, so people used mailing service and newspapers to share and consume content. Years later when she turned 10, her family got their first radio, she describes it as an amazing experience to enjoy shows and music heard from the small box. Back then whole families were sitting in front of the radio and listening to music or shows. Later in 1939 when the Second World War started radio had a powerful effect on it. It is hard to imagine command and control of troops without reliable communication, units cannot be quickly formed into attacking groups or effectively lead them on the battlefield. Of course, during the Second World War equipment of combat units was completely different from now, there were no satellite communications and portable radios. The government also used radio to promote their propaganda to get people involved in an army. After radio, TV was the next generation of media and communication. My grandmother got her first TV in 60th.

In the USSR the most popular was “Zenit TV” and “Rekord”. Its changed people's mind and the way they interact with others and the media. TV has both acoustic and visual impact, so people started to receive a clearer message (medium) as a result. TV turned into extremely powerful propaganda machine in many countries. Back in 1961, a Canadian psychologist Albert Bandura made an experiment with an inflatable Bobo doll. The experiment was about that the young children were shown different ways of interacting with the doll on the screen. In one case, she was hugged and stroked, in the other case, the doll was beaten. After watching the video, the children went into the room, and scientists watched their behavior. The results of the experiment demonstrated a direct connection between what the children saw on the screen and how they were playing with the doll. Now let's think about what factors determine whether the viewer will accept the model of behavior shown on the screen as a role model or reject it. If we consider an individual person, there are a lot of factors: the age, the situation, the format of the feed, the frequency and many others… If a person perceives watching TV as entertainment and does not think about the purpose for which this or why that content was created and what it teaches, then the critical filter is turned off at the time of viewing, and it simply consumes everything that comes in from the screen. This is exactly how most of the people got used to watching TV. Next big step in Media history evolution is an Internet.

The history of the Internet originates in the late 50s of the 20th century when the arms race began between the USSR and the USA. Tell my grandmother in the 60s that you can almost instantly contact any person (as I speak to my mother in Ukraine today via Viber) on the Earth or get access to any information created by humanity while at home and she will not believe. Almost all users use the Internet as a means of communication, providing instant, reliable and, most importantly, cheap communication. Social networks that have enmeshed society to establish and maintain contacts with like-minded people around the world and software such as Skype or WhatsApp are highly important for communication between two people separated by distance.

For example, let’s look at The Apple Store, one of the most famous application stores. The App Store was shown with the iPhone 3G and launched with only 500 applications. After 10 years those numbers have grown in incredible 10,000 times. Calendars and planners, email clients and broomsticks, browsers and readers, file aggregators and quantity of messengers and add to this all new games that many users play. Let's imagine how much time from the actual life you spend in front of a screen of your phone. There are 24 hours in a day, 8 hours I’m at college, another 8 hours I sleep, it remains 8 hours and other 8 hours of my life I on the smartphone. Interestingly that Mark Zuckerberg is the owner of the most popular social apps today: Facebook, Instagram, What’s App and Facebook Messenger. They are the most used in the United States, Europe, and Canada. In general, it would seem that all possible applications have been already created and it is almost impossible to surprise users. Nevertheless, we continue to go to the same App Store, look at the updates section and look for something new and interesting.

On the one hand, the passion for mobile software is rising every day. But on the other hand, I’m not particularly worried about the fact that in the past 5 years I have spent too much time on my smartphone, but my grandmother does…In addition, I want to say that I’ve read an article on the Blackboard and I agree with most things that Marshall Macluhan describes in his book, generally speaking there a lot more ways to send and receive information in 2018 rather than in the 60s but principles of perception and communication as a human being are the same for thousands of years.