The myth of interactivity on the Internet: March 18, 2002 issue of New Thinking

March 18, 2002 New Thinking:
The myth of interactivity on the Internet

Website content management

Home I About I Services I Clients I Contact

New Thinking Home

Subject Classification
Reader Feedback
Subscribing
Unsubscribing
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000
1999
1998
1997
1996

Books by
Gerry McGovern

Content Critical

Gaining competitive advantage through high-quality web content

The Web Content
Style Guide

The essential guide
for online writers, editors and managers

March 18, 2002

The myth of interactivity on the Internet

By Gerry McGovern

Interactivity has become an almost sacred tenet of the Internet. Again and again, we are told that interactivity is what makes the Internet really different. However, interactivity on the Internet is often vastly over-hyped.

Words like 'interactivity' and 'community' have been hugely abused and devalued over the last eight years. Nobody would call a group of people in a nightclub a community. However, to some, all you have to do is set up a discussion forum and you have an online community.

If you turn a page in a magazine or book, that doesn't exactly qualify as interactivity. Yet, if you click a link on the Web, many feel you are participating in an interactive activity. The reality is, of course, that the Web is very often the antithesis of interactivity and community.

If commerce is selling with people, then ecommerce is selling with content. If learning is learning with people, then elearning is learning with content. It is the very removal of people—with the consequent reduction of interactivity and community—that has attracted many businesses to the Web. Remove people, the thinking goes, and you remove costs. (In many situations, there is a lot of logic to this thinking.)

Basic interactivity on the Web very often fails. For example, organizations are notoriously bad at responding to email enquiries. In December 2001, a New York Times journalist sent email messages to 65 US senators. She informed them she was doing a story on email message handling by members of Congress. Amazingly, 31 senators didn't reply at all. 27 replied with automated messages. After two weeks, only 7 out of 65 had sent an actual response. Of those responses was one from Senator Phil Gramm's office, which stated that: "The communication that Sen. Gramm values most certainly does not arrive by wire."

A Jupiter Media Metrix survey of 250 retailer websites, published in January 2002, found interactivity sorely lacking. 30 percent of websites surveyed responded within 6 hours. 18 percent took 6 to 24 hours. 18 percent took 1 to 3 days. 34 percent took longer than 3 days or didn't respond at all.

It is still surprising the amount of people who believe that installing some chat or discussion board software will create an online community for their website. The software is only 1 percent of the job. The real work involves getting people to interact.

Online communities are very often more like clubs, associations or gangs, than genuine communities. Properly focused, they can contribute to social bonding and/or aid in the sharing of knowledge.

However, they often are a monumental waste of time. Many advertisers have shied away from such 'community' environments because they tend to contain people with too much time on their hands and too little money in their pockets.

We need to take a more realistic view of what interactivity and community means on the Web. Interactivity starts with having a policy in relation to how quickly you are going to respond to emails you receive. If you don't have that then your online community has about as much substance as a group of strangers in a nightclub.

Gerry McGovern

Next issue: Is your content being read?
Previous issue: Your website should have an opinion
New Thinking homepage

New Thinking Newsletter
Subscribe to this free weekly newsletter covering the role and function of content on the Web.
More info | Privacy policy
Read the current issue

Email Address:

 Subscribe  Unsubscribe

Content management seminar feedback
"Gerry's presentation was very well received by the more than 400 higher education delegates. I've chaired this meeting since 1994 and very few speakers have generated the same level of enthusiasm. Wit and wisdom is always an unbeatable combination."
Bob Johnson, American Marketing Association

“Excellent presenter ... thought-provoking and relevant. I hope we can persuade him to visit us again one day.”
Malcolm Davison
The British Association of Communicators in Business

"Hearing Gerry McGovern speaking, one can feel that he truly masters the subject of content management. He was voted ‘best speaker of the conference’ by delegates."
Toon Lowette
European Association of Directory Publishers

Find out more about Gerry McGovern's seminars

Interactivity starts with having a policy in relation to how quickly you are going to respond to emails you receive.

Content Critical: "Standard text"
February 27, 2002: "Content Critical is the best non-technical book on the subject of web content that I have come across to date … For those interested in the ‘change management’ dimension of content and knowledge management, Content Critical may well become the standard text."
More
Andy Harrison, Content Management Focus magazine