Words Teach Us How to Interact
My boss and some of Quinnipiac’s interactive students did an analysis of the words in our course titles since the start of the program. I hadn’t seen the results, and he asked me which word I thought had decreased the most in use.
“Digital?”
“Well, you are the word man.”
I was right.
While the word “digital” described a change in our culture, it never said anything about the effects of that change. Media is digital now. It’s no longer analog, like magnetic sound tape or celluloid film or printed pages. So what?
Calling everything “new” media meant even less. That we term anything with new just illustrates how unaware every generation is of its own youth, or in denial it will become old. New can never last long as a description. Even “New York” is losing its luster.
“Mobile” was also a change and not an outcome. So were “electronic,” “Internet,” and “online.”
In 1994, Ogilvy & Mather coined the terms e-business and e-commerce for an IBM marketing campaign, the “e” standing for electronic.
Four years later, Steve Jobs introduced the iMac, the first Apple i-product, preceding the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007. He said the “i” in iMac stood for Internet, and by extension, individual, instruct, inform, and inspire. It was more marketing hype, but it was Jobs’ marketing hype—more prescient than most people’s research.
Jobs was smarter than IBM to stress the Internet and particularly the individual over electronics or commerce to reach consumers, but the lasting result of his and all of these monikers is our interconnectedness.
Which is why the term “interactive” persists in the Quinnipiac program course titles and our public conversation. It describes the effect created by the new digitization and mobility of media. “Interactivity” is responsible for almost everything in the headlines over the past few years.
The average person used to be an audience member, a spectator. Now we write, snap, tweet, and make—making us more cognizant of our realities as we edit and design them.
Individually, each of us sees the Web, our smartphone, and mobile digitization as an extension of our self, but all of these rendered personal narratives must go somewhere. We are all, suddenly, just as much audience members to one another as we are all on stage.
People have always been in filter bubbles. Denial, compartmentalization, and tribalism are survival techniques, far older than electronics or even technology. Interactivity bursts our bubbles and that’s what we’re seeing everyday, from the constant creativity and change to the obstinate outrage and lashing out.
These are succeeding and failing relationships, and unfortunately, the failure is more visible and frightening.
“I don’t care how people live; I just don’t want to see it.” I see some variation on that failure to connect in comment threads daily.
I titled my course blogs and books with “interactive” because its definition taught me the most when I started research for my classes. It became one of the lead words in my writing, fitting snuggly into keywords already there: screenwriting, dialogue, conversation, interdisciplinary, metaphor, mashup, communication, and ideas.
“Digital” didn’t teach me a thing, but “interactivity” helped me see the challenges ahead. I’ve taught these courses for almost a decade, and my lectures’ understanding of the issues have only expanded.
Words matter and the keywords that matter to you will come to you if you write searching for them. That’s my lesson and my technique. When you write to confirm what you already know and set it in stone, you remain in your bubble, alone.
When you write to interpret and discover, and connect and change, the right keywords can show you the future.