A Design Framework of Interactive Media

Abstract

In an effort to provide a framework for digital literacy that encourages critical thinking about the tools of digital media, this paper outlines common themes within their design. The goal of this framework is two-fold: 1) to offer students a more critical lens with which to engage as they go about employing these media in a variety of contexts, and 2) to offer scholars a simplified, design-based framework for furthering research and theory. I provide a basis for this framework first by making an argument for the umbrella term “interactive media,” as interactivity is the one feature that links all of the media considered here and is therefore the feature that is least likely to change; second by extending Lisa Gitelman’s concept of “social and cultural protocols” of media¹ with the suggestion that they could be further broken down into delivery, use, and demand protocols; and finally, based on a synthesis of key works in the literature, especially those that address the basic elements of interactive media, by identifying three core principles of interactive media (digital, databased, and networked) and discussing and their associated protocols.

Introduction

A couple of years ago, in a class I teach entitled “Interactive Media & Society,” I explained to my students that (1) everything they do online creates data and (2) this data is typically stored on the servers that are owned by the company whose site they are using and often on several other servers owned by various entities. As I spoke, I noticed a young woman in the front row looking increasingly apprehensive. She raised her hand and asked hesitantly, “Is it true that the pictures you send on Snapchat² can be saved?” The whole class perked up, awaiting my answer. Even though I knew very little about Snapchat at the time, my response was, “I’m sure they can—with interactive media, where there’s a will, there’s always a way.” Her and several of her classmates’ eyebrows raised as they began laughing nervously and looking around at each other in surprise.

Snapchat, a photo-sharing app that was started in 2011, is one of the recent tools that allow users to share what Shein³ calls “ephemeral data,” or data that is shared and then disappears after a pre-determined set amount of time. (In Snapchat’s case, the time is a matter of seconds determined by the sender.) Therefore it is seen as a more “private” way to send messages, and users may feel more comfortable sending photos that contain questionable or sensitive content. For example, in a survey conducted in 2014, Roesner, Gill and Kohno found that 23.6% of users admitted to having sent sexual or pseudo-sexual content via Snapchat.⁴ As it turns out, my initial instinct when answering this student’s question was correct. Subsequent to the release of Snapchat, third-party apps were developed that could capture and recover Snapchat images, regardless of their “ephemeral” disappearing act. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission recently approved final charges against Snapchat for misleading its users about the degree of their privacy protections.⁵

Young people today are called “digital natives” because they grew up with new digital media technologies and are therefore more familiar with and skilled at using them than previous generations.⁶ How, then, could it be that my “digital native” students didn’t even realize that an image lasting five seconds could be captured, saved, stored, and reused in unwanted or unintended ways? As it turns out, digital natives, while very good at adopting and using new technologies, are not as good at thinking critically about the tools themselves and their uses of them.⁷ In fact, because of their “native” status, they may be even more susceptible to the potential negative outcomes of these tools.⁸ While young people today have the skillsets to use new media, they do not fully understand the fundamentals of what they are, how they operate, or how they can interact with each other.⁹

Meanwhile, the research on digital literacy programs shows a strong focus on skill-building, training students how to use new media in meaningful ways.¹⁰ While this training is certainly of great usefulness and importance, learning how to use these media does not necessarily provide students with an analytical approach to their use.¹¹ More thoughtful use is needed. As Gillmor explains, “Learning how to snap a photo with a mobile phone is useful, but it’s just as important to know all the possibilities of what you can do with that picture and to understand how it fits into a larger media ecosystem.”¹² In addition, while these programs frequently teach students how to think critically about the information received in the digital realm,¹³ critical thinking around the tools themselves seems to be left unaddressed.

In an effort to add a dimension of “tool-oriented” critical assessment to digital literacy efforts, here I offer a framework for understanding and assessing the core design principles of new media.¹⁴ The goal of this framework is two-fold: 1) to offer students a more critical lens with which to engage as they go about employing these media in a variety of contexts, and 2) to offer digital media scholars a simplified design-based framework for furthering research and theory. Although communication scholars have been classifying new media according to varying characteristics and in varying ways since their arrival,¹⁵ I see design as the most simple and straightforward lens through which to view them, because design is easily understood and yet central to how media operate. In order to think critically about the tools themselves, students need to garner an understanding of what it is that makes these media different than those that came before.¹⁶ And it is in their fundamental design characteristics that these differences lie.

At its core, design is how we make sense of communication.¹⁷ When we communicate, we naturally “devise strategies and practices to engage meaning, action and coherence.”¹⁸ When we communicate through media, these strategies and practices are embedded in the design of the tool itself, which both shapes and is shaped by its use.¹⁹ As I will argue in the following sections, while new media technologies do vary widely in purpose, function and use, there is at least one fundamental design principle that they all have in common (that they are interactive) and three that most share (that they are digital, networked, and databased). Because the specific design of an interactive medium can both constrain communication and allow for new possibilities²⁰ (such as allowing an individual more control over their content by limiting the amount of time it can be viewed with Snapchat), exploring common design principles can help us to think about how they are being, have been, and can be, used.

Interactive Media: What’s in a Name?

To begin this endeavor, I offer my own working definition of interactive media:

the collection of communication resources and tools, made available via computer networks, mobile technologies, electronic devices and the Internet, that have emerged in recent decades and enabled broader public participation in society, culture, and commerce.

These include web-based media, social media, participatory media, software editing tools, feedback tools, video games and their consoles, mobile devices and media, wearable media, and many others, including those yet to be innovated. While these tools may frequently be referred to as “new media,” “emerging media,” “digital media,” or other varied classifications, it could be argued that the litany of names we use to describe these media confuses and dilutes the heuristic value of each. In my view, the term “interactive media” is the most apt umbrella term, because it speaks to the one element of these media that most accurately separates them from what came before them.

In 2001, Manovich argued against the use of “interactive” for the very reason I am going argue for it: because it is a term that is redundant with computer usage.²¹ The present-day notion of “interactive” simply means responsive to some input or command,²² which is a fundamental design characteristic of all computer-based systems.²³ Manovich’s argument against this term made sense in 2001, when virtually all interactive media were made available solely through a computer, but that is no longer the case. In 2015, we have phones, televisions, video game systems, and even watches and car systems that essentially are computers without looking like them. If the projections of the futurists and technology companies are correct, the “internet of things” will continue to evolve, and soon consumers will also access these media through such “devices” as countertops, appliances and wearable glasses.²⁴ Despite this variability in form, interactivity is the one feature that links all of these media, and it is therefore the feature that is least likely to change.

Further, the term “interactivity” itself is one that has been defined numerous ways, in various disciplines, with multiple origins in the academic literature.²⁵ Fornäs et al. point out that the term has been used to describe multiple kinds of interactivity: “social interactivity,” which describes media that enable human-to-human social interaction; “technical interactivity,” which refers to the human-machine communication I referred to earlier; or “textual interactivity,” which is “the creative and interpretive interaction between humans and texts.”²⁶ Interactive media as I have defined them frequently enable all three of these forms of interactivity. Kiousis added some clarity to the term “interactivity” in 2002 when he conducted an in-depth concept explication, reviewing its multiplicities in the literature. The comprehensive definition at which he ultimately arrived is as follows:

Interactivity can be defined as the degree to which a communication technology can create a mediated environment in which participants can communicate (one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many), both synchronously and asynchronously, and participate in reciprocal message exchanges (third-order dependency). With regard to human users, it additionally refers to their ability to perceive the experience as a simulation of interpersonal communication and increase their awareness of telepresence.²⁷

This definition also corresponds well to my definition of interactive media opening this section, as it speaks to the centrality of communication and participation to interactivity, as well as the use of mediating technology. Perhaps because of rather than in spite of the polysemic nature of the term, it is the most appropriate to describe media that are extremely varied in form and function, enable multiple kinds of uses, and operate in unending ways, because each definition of interactivity speaks to the nature of these media in some way.

Now that I have established a label and working definition of the types of media I am discussing here, I will attempt to explain the rest of my proposed framework, which begins with a discussion of the social and cultural protocols of media in general and then moves on to explore these protocols in terms of the three core design features of interactive media specifically.

Social and Cultural Protocols of Media

In his 2006 book “Convergence Culture,” a seminal work on interactive media, Henry Jenkins presents a useful dual-level model of understanding media put forth by historian Lisa Gitelman.²⁸ According to this model, any medium should first be understood at its basic level as “a technology that enables communication” in some way.²⁹ Each medium, however, also carries with it a second level of “associated ‘protocols’ or social and cultural practices that have grown up around that technology.”³⁰ These protocols are often features that we assume to be innate to the medium itself, but that is because they have become embedded as norms and standards of the tool, which are so common they become invisible to us.³¹ In fact, these protocols are the combined result of how the medium was designed (the tools, resources and features made available), and how we have used it over time (what users have chosen to employ or not to employ, and the ways in which they do so).³²

Gitelman herself has stated that defining media according to their protocols is admittedly “muddy.”³³ However, this conceptualization could prove to be immensely useful, especially as a framework for improving digital literacy, because understanding how a medium and its uses have evolved can help us better understand how to use it wisely. So, for the sake of elucidation and organization, I have further broken down these protocols into three separate but related types: (1) delivery protocols, or the characteristics of distribution; (2) use protocols, or the social and cultural functions in our everyday lives; and (3) demand protocols, or what comes to be expected from the medium. Conceptualizing media according to these “associated protocols” is a useful way to understand aspects of their uses, outcomes, influences, and effects without being divorced from a discussion of design features, characteristics, and comparisons.

As an example, consider the medium of newspapers in their traditional, physical form. The way a newspaper enables communication is through ink printed on physical paper, across several pages, in the form of text and images. These are the core design features of a physical newspaper. The delivery, use, and demand “protocols” are related to the constraints and affordances of those features,³⁴ as well as the social and historical evolution of the medium through time.³⁵Considering just the offline version of newspapers as they exist today, some delivery protocols would be printing presses, daily or weekly distribution, delivery personnel, low costs, subscriptions, and a one-to-many information flow. Use protocols would include keeping up-to-date with current events and perspectives, being informed, having something to look at while eating breakfast or riding the train, searching classified ads, doing crossword puzzles, etc. Demand protocols are the things we have come to expect, such as the news being current and up-to-date, the reporting professional and high-quality, and the paper affordable. We could apply this framework to any number of media—television, radio, film—and it is exceedingly useful for delineating the links and relationships between these design principles and protocols, and for making comparisons across media. For example, television and film both provide video as well as sound yet have vastly different delivery, use, and demand protocols. Television and radio both have the ability to offer live broadcasts, but that is a higher demand protocol in radio. Radio is the only traditional medium to have a “while driving” use protocol. Newspapers and radio both have a high demand protocol for local information (less so for television). The list goes on and on.

So far in this discussion of principles and protocols, I have only considered traditional, analog forms of media. When it comes to interactive media, this model is particularly useful because it can be applied to each tool, each technology, each medium, or each app individually. Therefore it can account for the massive variability that is found in the interactive media realm. One should not, for example, consider the principles and protocols of “the Internet” or “computers” as a medium, but instead of Snapchat, Youtube, Netflix, Minecraft, etc. This also allows for the “interactive” versions of all traditional media to be understood in terms of the new design features that they offer. For example, when books are converted to e-books, they offer a more interactive version of reading than their offline counterparts through hyperlinks, networked highlighting, and commenting features.³⁶

Core Design Principles of Interactive Media

While interactivity is the one principle that all interactive media have in common, within that there is room for each to have a specific “fingerprint” in its combination of design features (e.g., Twitter is largely text-based and has a 140 character limit; Wikipedia is also text-based but uses an open-editing collaboration platform; Pandora provides music and uses feedback-based customization; YouTube provides video and shows view counts). Based on a synthesis of key works in the literature, especially those that address the basic elements of interactive media, I have identified three additional “common,” or core, design principles: digital, databased, and networked. Each new site, app, social media, and technology that emerges as an interactive media technology is built on at least two, and typically all three, of these principles. Each principle also has associated with it social and cultural protocols (which develop and evolve at an accelerated pace) for delivery, demand, and use. These are explained in more detail in the following sections, and summarized in brief in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Design principles and associated protocols of interactive media.

The Digital Design Principle

When media are produced and made available through digital as opposed to analog means, the producer is essentially breaking down and quantifying content.³⁷ Everything that we see and hear in digital media is actually split into discrete electronic “packets,” or samples of information that are so tiny that our senses perceive them as a continuous whole.³⁸ Digital media create and present intangible objects on a screen, take up a lot less space, are easier to break down for editing, and can be replicated in their exact original forms with no loss of quality, endlessly.³⁹ As a simple example of how the processes of digital media are different that those of analog, consider the practices of editing, revising, and sharing with five people a manuscript using Microsoft Word and email as opposed to working with a physical hard copy. The same is true of print, graphic, audio and video-based digital media productions. Because of their digital nature, these media and the content produced through them are monumentally easier to use, manipulate, edit, and rearrange than their continuous analog counterparts.⁴⁰ The nature of digital media also means that massive amounts of content can be stored on disks and devices that are small, compact, and portable.⁴¹

The protocols associated with the digital design principle center around the idea that interactive media are made more available and more accessible. In delivery, they are low-cost and powerful.⁴² The information, ideas and content produced by interactive media are more easily, and infinitely, replicable as a result of the digital design principle.⁴³ When digitized, information, ideas, and content exist more as they would in their “natural” state, as thought or energy.⁴⁴ The digital design principle also means that interactive media can be accessed on multiple devices and platforms, including mobile ones.⁴⁵ Interactive media can go with you, making them unbound by place.⁴⁶

When media is digital, barriers to production are lowered and more people can participate.⁴⁷ Although there is still a pervasive digital divide in terms of access and skills,⁴⁸ those who are using digital media are experiencing a very different kind of relationship to media and the world.⁴⁹ With use protocols, users are employing interactive media to edit, create, appropriate, and remix media content.⁵⁰ It is no longer just the professional media producers that can create quality media, because there is a reduced cost for production, time, effort, and distribution.⁵¹ This has resulted in what Shirky has called a “mass amatuerization” of media production,⁵² as well as an “active” consumer base producing a quantity of user-generated content that few had ever thought financially possible.⁵³ It is also extremely easy and cheap or free to copy, obtain, and access media, which in turn makes it more spreadable⁵⁴ and able to reach much larger audiences.⁵⁵ Finally, the mobility of media means that users are able to access content more frequently and from wherever they are.⁵⁶

For demand protocols, users of digital media content have begun to expect that it be easy to edit and manipulate, as well as cheap, accessible, and “for the taking.” These very aspects have made interactive media so difficult to consider in traditional framings of law surrounding intellectual property and copyright law.⁵⁷ Users expect media to be easy for them to access, use, and replicate as they like.⁵⁸ It is also the now norm for users to be “always on,” meaning they have a device with them nearly all the time, allowing them to both send and receive information as they please, and even to be frequently interrupted by the receipt of messages.⁵⁹

The Networked Design Principle

The networked design principle reflects our ability to connect with each other through interactive media. For the first time in history, we have media that allow us to communicate in a many-to-many communication pattern, as opposed to one-to-many, one-to-one, or perhaps few-to-few.⁶⁰ This reflects the end-to-end or peer-to-peer design of computer networks,⁶¹ which “assures those with a new idea get to sell that new idea, the views of the network owner notwithstanding.”⁶²In many cases, this creates a more decentralized media structure and eliminates the need for gatekeepers or middlemen filtering our capability to access information, ideas or content.⁶³ It is also the driving principle behind open-source systems, in which everyone can contribute to content.⁶⁴

In terms of use protocols, the networked principle enables very social uses such as sharing, group-forming, networking, and collaborating. Users are expressing themselves to others as they share content with friends.⁶⁵ The sharing of ideas, information, and content also helps to spark competition⁶⁶ and generate new ideas.⁶⁷ Users can associate with each other in new ways by forming and joining groups and networks in a way that Shirky refers to as “ridiculously easy.”⁶⁸ The increased capability to act and communicate in large groups has also had profound effects on the ability to collaborate, get things done, and be empowered through online communities and open-source systems.⁶⁹ On the negative side, online communities can sometimes support bad behavior when they use interactive media to find one another and form their own echo chambers.⁷⁰

As demand protocols emerge from the networked design principle, there is an increasing expectation that information will be unsuppressed and free from interference.⁷¹ Consumers expect content to be “spreadable,” meaning they distribute and circulate it however they please, regardless of the media producers’ intentions.⁷² Similarly, citizens around the world are experiencing a cultural shift with respect to unprecedented access to unsuppressed information.⁷³ More and more, users expect information to be free. In fact, this is one of the main tenets of hacker culture.⁷⁴ They also expect content to be open and sometimes even free of cost when it is shared through peer-to-peer file sharing.⁷⁵ Additionally, the collaborative nature of open-source production is resulting in a lowered expectation for attribution and authorship,⁷⁶ and a “blurring of producers and consumers.”⁷⁷ Finally, users are increasing their expectations of one another: combining the networked protocol of connecting with others and the digital protocol of mobility, users know that receivers of their messages have their mobile devices with them and therefore they expect more a more immediate response.⁷⁸

The Databased Design Principle

When using interactive media, digital information is stored as data, which can be, and frequently is, archived and stored.⁷⁹ These databases drive the processes that allow search engines to work and allow various systems to make recommendations to us, show statistics, or identify the most popular content and “trends.”⁸⁰ It is also this principle that drives the process of hyperlinking and embedding content,⁸¹ as every single page is a stored piece of data to which can then be pointed to with the use of URLs.⁸² This design principle has been an imagined component of interactive media since before it was even possible to exist.⁸³

The associated delivery protocols of the databased design principle center around this idea of archiving and storage. Most content produced through interactive media is indexed, or at least indexable, meaning that it is stored and searchable, through the use of text, keywords, and tags.⁸⁴ When archiving is used for the process of networked interaction, it also allows for the possibility of asynchronous communication, allowing for “lag” between a message and its response time.⁸⁵ This means that interactive media allow people to communicate not only unbound by place as a result of the digital design principle, but also unbound by time as a result of the databased design principle.⁸⁶ Messages can be searched, called up, and even reactivated at any point in their future.⁸⁷ Finally, the ability to store information in databases also allows for customized content in delivery, offering recommendations and filtering based on your stored information, preferences, and past usage history, matching with astonishing accuracy “the complexity of our preferences”⁸⁸ through automated algorithms.⁸⁹

In use, users are engaging in more organizing, promoting, rating, commenting, and searching of information. Content and ideas can be organized, promoted, and rated, sometimes consciously through tagging, labeling, and downvoting or upvoting, and sometimes just through use by clicking, viewing, browsing, or purchasing.⁹⁰ Users also are able to promote things for other people, companies, or politicians because it is so easy to “like,” embed, and link. In expressing their identities, users act as marketing tools.⁹¹ However, they often get to provide more feedback and have more of a say through features like reviewing, voting, and commentary.⁹² It is also easier to organize content, ideas, and knowledge through various interactive media. The ability to communicate asynchronously and archive that communication can slow down interaction and make it more explicit, which means users are able to gather and interact in much larger groups than is possible amidst the chaos of live interaction.⁹³ The archiving capability creates the context for what Pierre Levy has termed “collective intelligence,” where individuals can pool together and build on one another’s knowledge over time.⁹⁴ In addition, users are searching more information more often and at an increased rate on a regular basis.⁹⁵ Unfortunately, because so much more data is being shared and collected about us on a regular basis, some use protocols of the databased design principle leave users vulnerable to identity theft, privacy violations, and surveillance.⁹⁶ This data can also be used to track individuals and even predict behavior.⁹⁷

Users have also come to expect certain things as a result of the databased design principle. The demand protocols include an expectation of comprehensive, searchable content.⁹⁸ For example, it is expected that virtually any movie will be found on IMDB, nearly any song will be in iTunes, and any research topic of interest will be on Wikipedia, and that all of this can be easily found with a search engine. Users also expect content through interactive media to be easy to link to and allow room for feedback and participation.⁹⁹ If there is not an easy “button” for linking, liking, embedding, rating, or commenting, users are frustrated or surprised.¹⁰⁰

Before I close this discussion, a caveat: please do not mistake my delineation of these three design principles as an argument that they are here to stay. This has been an attempt to solidify the main design principles that we can observe with interactive media thus far. Considering the interactive media environment as we currently understand it, it can be said that most interactive media at least start out with two or more of these principles in place, though others may emerge. In addition, each of these principles and protocols is vulnerable to being squashed or reduced out of existence as new gatekeepers roll in and, intentionally or not, recentralize, censor, or filter through other design features.¹⁰¹ As we move to the cloud and increasingly centralized models of storage and production, the end-to-end model is being “replaced by the hierarchical structures of client and server.”¹⁰² In addition, the participatory culture paradigm that we are currently experiencing in relation to these principles and protocols is under threat from corporate influence on the legal system.¹⁰³ The above discussion is simply a model for conceptualizing interactive media in a way that can provide a core basis for understanding how these processes can happen, have happened, are happening, or will happen.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have attempted to provide a common framework that can be applied to interactive media. This is by no means complete, and, in terms of the protocols, the list I have provided of delivery systems, uses, and user demands is not intended to be comprehensive. These lists will continue to grow as more interactive media tools emerge and evolve. In fact, this framework is intended to be flexible enough to be used as new tools are developed and emerge by focusing, as Baym has suggested, on “specific capabilities and consequences rather than the media themselves.”¹⁰⁴ The aim of this framework is to offer a simple, design-focused lens for scholars and students of interactive media to better understand, analyze, and explore these tools and their outcomes.

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