HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION

Human–computer interaction:

Intervention and control a technical idea of interactivity has taken shape most strongly within the discipline of human–computer interaction (HCI). This is a scientific and industrial field which studies and attempts to improve the interface between computers and users. An ‘interactive mode’ of computer use was first posited during the years of mainframe computers when large amounts of data were fed into the machine to be processed.

At first, once the data was entered, the machine was left to get on with the processing (batch processing). Gradually however, as the machines became more sophisticated, it became possible to intervene into the process whilst it was still running through the use of dialogue boxes or menus. This was known as operating the computer in an ‘interactive’ mode (Jensen 1999: 168).

This ability to intervene in the computing process and see the results of your intervention in real time was essentially a controlfunction. It was a one-way command communication from the operator to the machine. This is a very different idea of interaction from the popularised senses of hypertextual freedom described above (Huhtamo 2000).

This idea of interaction as control continued to develop through the discipline of HCI and was led by the ideas of technologists like Licklider and Engelbart (Licklider and Taylor 1999 [orig: 1968]; Engelbart 1999 [orig: 1963]). If the kind of symbiosis between operator and machine that they envisaged was to take place then this interactive mode had to be extended and made available outside of the small groups who understood the specialised programming languages.

To this end, during the early 1970s, researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center developed the GUI, the graphical user interface, which would work within the simultaneously developed standard format for the PC: keyboard, processor, screen and mouse. In what has become one of the famous moments in the history of Xerox, they failed to exploit their remarkable breakthroughs. Later, Apple were able to use the GUI to launch their range of PCs in the early 1980s: first the Apple Lisa, then in 1984 the celebrated Apple Mac.

These GUI systems were then widely imitated by Microsoft.
Communication studies and the ‘face-to-face’ paradigm However, this idea of interaction as control, as interface manipulation, is somewhat at odds with the idea of interactivity as a mutually reciprocal communication process, whether between user and machine/database or between user and user. Here we encounter an understanding of the term derived from sociology and communications studies. This tradition has attempted to describe and analyse interactivity and computers in relation to interactivity in face-to-face human communication. In this research interaction is identified as a core human behaviour, the foundation of culture and community.

For communications theorists interaction is a quality present in varying degrees as a quality of communication. So a question and answer pattern of communication is somewhat ‘less’ interactive than an open-ended dialogue (see, for example, Shutz 2000; Jensen 1999). Similarly the modes of interactivity described in 1.2would here be classified on a scale of least to most interactive, with the various kinds of CMC ‘most’ interactive and the navigational choices ‘least’ interactive.

Generally; various commentators (for example, Stone 1995: 10; Aarseth 1997: 49) quote Andy Lippman’s definition of interactivity generated at MIT in the 1980s as an ‘ideal’. For Lippman interactivity was ‘mutual and simultaneous activity on the part of both participants, usually working toward some goal, but not necessarily’. This state needed to be achieved through a number of conditions.

BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA

BAPRM III - 42686