Once the simultaneity of liveness becomes instant feedback between images and the world, an inversion takes place in what was once called representation: neither image or world is “first”, and each is likely to shape the other. Interactivity is usually conceived as a means of allowing the consumer/viewer to select or change the image with the help of an input device-telephone, keyboard, remote control, joystick, mouse, touch-screen, brain wave reader, et cetera. Interactivity like this has been mistaken for a kind of emancipatory self-expression that will change the very nature of communication…However, if interactivity is an extension of the notion of immediate feedback of input on a display, that is, if it is operational and instrumental, does an input device of any kind make what is on televison or computer monitor any more intersubjective or liberating?
This is not to discount the importance and necessity of intersubjectivity between humans and humans, humans and machines, and even machines and machines – as long as the often unprofitable and inefficient forums of intersubjectivity, the mutual recognition, communication, and reflection of subjects that are the foundation of sociality and civility can also take place. The price of intersubjectivity is not only all sort of infelicities and contingencies, but a process that can shift the framework that began the exchange between the parties involved in the first place.
Morse, 1997
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