Gonna interact yo ass!
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005 01:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturner"Interactive", along with its variant forms, is well on the way to joining the List of Words I Hate. There was a brief time when describing a medium as interactive actually meant something, largely because most of the media we were familiar with at the time weren't interactive. When computers came along, we were impressed. The program said something to you (like "Press Enter to continue"), then you did something (like pressing the Enter key), and depending on what you did, it did something else (like cover the screen with static). We were so impressed, in fact, that we needed a word for this kind of thing, and thus came up with "interactive".
Of course the word had been knocking around for some time before that: according to the OED, it first appeared in print in 1832 (though it was not to be used for computers until 1967). However, it only really took off in the 1980s, when ordinary people realised the power at their fingertips as they crouched over their Apples and Commodore 64s. Now, almost everything is "interactive". I was in the bank today trying to do things the old-fashioned way, waiting in line with no other claim to my money than a driving licence. Since anyone who is silly enough not to use Internet banking and arrogant enough to expect bank clerks to hand over hard cash is made to wait for hours just to remind them what a technobarbarian they are, I had plenty of opportunity to take in every printed word in the bank, which boasted no less than three electronic devices (not counting the ATMs in the wall outside). One was an incredibly sophisticated way of getting the slip of paper that you need if you really want to talk to a carbon-based life form. You can touch the screen in the appropriate place, swipe your ATM card down the side, or probably just stare hard at it, and you get a piece of paper with a number equal to n+100, where n is the number in the LED above the cashier's desk. Another was an equally touchy-feely Internet terminal, as a last reminder to customers that bank clerks are highly-trained professionals who have more important things to do with their time than answer questions or hand out money. Finally, there was a good, old-fashioned telephone attached to the wall.
But wait! This was no ordinary telephone. To compete with its high-tech brethren, it had been upgraded to make it an "interactive telephone" (or rather, since this is Turkey, an "interaktif telefon"). Now maybe I am dull and literal-minded, but I cannot imagine what a functional but non-interactive telephone would be like. Either you pick it up and listen without being able to say anything, or you talk into it and get no response (this is not high-tech, this was the state of most British payphones during the Thatcher era).
Another case of interactive silliness is a phrase that has become popular in educational circles: "interact with the text". If I go to another seminar where some budding pedagogue talks about "getting students to interact with the text" I will run the risk of having a serious interaction with the presenter. We're not talking about hypertext here; we're talking about books. You can't interact with a book. You can read it, think about it, write notes in the margins, spill coffee on it or throw it across the room, but whatever you do, the book will not react. It will sit there, stubbornly being the same old book. You can't even give it instructions to turn the page when you finish it. Compared to a book, those Sinclair ZX81s were paradigms of elegant social interaction.
Out of sheer perversity, I just googled on "interactive yogurt OR yoghurt"* One of the sites that came up was entitled "The Interactive Kitchen". Please, I do not want my kitchen to be interactive. I want my kitchen to be full of simple but servicable tools that do not answer back - knives and saucepans, for example. I have just about got the hang of using my microwave oven (even though it doesn't run Linux and thus has no command line). The last thing I want it to do is give me snappy comebacks.
* For the benefit of people wanting to solve this British vs. American spelling controversy, the correct spelling is "yoğurt", which is pronounced in various ways depending on which Turkic ethnic group you belong to - where I am, it's pronounced something like "yourt".
Of course the word had been knocking around for some time before that: according to the OED, it first appeared in print in 1832 (though it was not to be used for computers until 1967). However, it only really took off in the 1980s, when ordinary people realised the power at their fingertips as they crouched over their Apples and Commodore 64s. Now, almost everything is "interactive". I was in the bank today trying to do things the old-fashioned way, waiting in line with no other claim to my money than a driving licence. Since anyone who is silly enough not to use Internet banking and arrogant enough to expect bank clerks to hand over hard cash is made to wait for hours just to remind them what a technobarbarian they are, I had plenty of opportunity to take in every printed word in the bank, which boasted no less than three electronic devices (not counting the ATMs in the wall outside). One was an incredibly sophisticated way of getting the slip of paper that you need if you really want to talk to a carbon-based life form. You can touch the screen in the appropriate place, swipe your ATM card down the side, or probably just stare hard at it, and you get a piece of paper with a number equal to n+100, where n is the number in the LED above the cashier's desk. Another was an equally touchy-feely Internet terminal, as a last reminder to customers that bank clerks are highly-trained professionals who have more important things to do with their time than answer questions or hand out money. Finally, there was a good, old-fashioned telephone attached to the wall.
But wait! This was no ordinary telephone. To compete with its high-tech brethren, it had been upgraded to make it an "interactive telephone" (or rather, since this is Turkey, an "interaktif telefon"). Now maybe I am dull and literal-minded, but I cannot imagine what a functional but non-interactive telephone would be like. Either you pick it up and listen without being able to say anything, or you talk into it and get no response (this is not high-tech, this was the state of most British payphones during the Thatcher era).
Another case of interactive silliness is a phrase that has become popular in educational circles: "interact with the text". If I go to another seminar where some budding pedagogue talks about "getting students to interact with the text" I will run the risk of having a serious interaction with the presenter. We're not talking about hypertext here; we're talking about books. You can't interact with a book. You can read it, think about it, write notes in the margins, spill coffee on it or throw it across the room, but whatever you do, the book will not react. It will sit there, stubbornly being the same old book. You can't even give it instructions to turn the page when you finish it. Compared to a book, those Sinclair ZX81s were paradigms of elegant social interaction.
Out of sheer perversity, I just googled on "interactive yogurt OR yoghurt"* One of the sites that came up was entitled "The Interactive Kitchen". Please, I do not want my kitchen to be interactive. I want my kitchen to be full of simple but servicable tools that do not answer back - knives and saucepans, for example. I have just about got the hang of using my microwave oven (even though it doesn't run Linux and thus has no command line). The last thing I want it to do is give me snappy comebacks.
* For the benefit of people wanting to solve this British vs. American spelling controversy, the correct spelling is "yoğurt", which is pronounced in various ways depending on which Turkic ethnic group you belong to - where I am, it's pronounced something like "yourt".
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no subject
Date: 2005-05-02 11:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-03 05:04 am (UTC)On side note, a friend used to wonder why one could not be chalent.
no subject
Date: 2005-05-03 08:33 am (UTC)"Inflammable/flammable" is an interesting case, as it was a deliberate change. The original was "inflammable", but the prefix was dropped because some people read the "in" as a negative rather than a preposition, and thus thought "inflammable" meant something like "fireproof".
no subject
Date: 2005-05-03 11:04 am (UTC)BTW, I like the icon, but why isn't there a copy of the Critiques in the kitchen? Speaking of Kant, I have finally finished teaching the Groundwork, and my admiration for you for being able to plough through this stuff is increased. As I said to my students, "Don't worry if you find Kant difficult - this is the only major work by Kant that I've actually been able to finish."
no subject
Date: 2005-05-03 11:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-03 11:22 am (UTC)Did you ever read the Prolegomena? It's fairly readable.
no subject
Date: 2005-05-03 12:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-03 05:20 pm (UTC)my personal peeves:
interactive: if i hit the computer in frustration, will the punch land on the programmer's solar plexus?
real time: if i throw the computer out the window, will it impact the earth in real time or after accelerating through physics time to reach inertia time?
hypertext: Does it run faster? Can I read it quicker?
ugh. i could go on and over and cliche us all to boredom
my girlfriend is smart
Date: 2005-05-03 08:04 pm (UTC)she says that if you keep your fingers crossed, you too can have access to the beauty of non-interactive telephones.
no subject
Date: 2005-05-04 05:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-04 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-19 10:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-07 07:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-28 08:00 am (UTC)