I started work in the media at the time when my columnist mum lost interest in journalism. Later, I became a professor when my dad, a would-be academic, had passed on.
Both parents are now gone. Reflecting back, it seems I became them. Not belatedly, but too late. It’s probably time therefore that I try to carve something different for myself…
But in the meantime, courtesy of the Mail & Guardian editors, I’ve a chance to play fortnightly columnist. Hence these thoughts — crafted in order to converse with you, the reader. And maybe, too, with you as a respondent.
Here’s an invitation: make community with me in this interchange of ideas and information. Help explore whether interactivity is something deeper than website navigation buttons or one-click opinion polls.
Let’s see if linear text on a screen can touch head or heart, provoke an engagement equivalent to any whiz-bang multimedia production. Ready? Read on — and then write back.
Here is whence I come. Nothing sacred by Lucy Gough Berger was my mother’s weekly column carried in The Star newspaper in the 1970s. It ran for more than 10 years, embarrassed the hell out of me and my sisters. When Lucy ran out of ideas, she wrote about us.
Like the time she lamented when I’d gone to university and picked up politics. ”He used to read Rider Haggard, now he reads Hegel”, she wrote. It was her losing a son as he moved from colonial novels to what she imagined was communism.
I wasn’t quite as red as all that. Maybe more black (as in anarchistic and as in pro-black nationalism). But Lucy couldn’t grasp any of this. She was a trapped generation. After I emerged from two and a half years jail for pro-ANC politics, she asked me, in the most tentative of voices, ”Do you really believe in majority rule?”
That’s 1983, a long time ago. Yet it is easy to recall that her writing was popular and people responded to it. It had personality, even punch. She had a witty way with words. The question is: this column you’re reading now — does it come in her shadow or her light? Or some kind of combo?
The challenge Lucy bequeathed me is to try to write well. Be mindful of that history. But in this new world, I also need to be mindful of the medium I’m using. The web is a platform different to newsprint. Its essence is supposed to be interactivity.
Last year, I challenged some journalism students to go beyond a ”clickist” conception of interactivity. A navigation button per se is not really different to a contents page in a book, I posited.
In other words, is interactivity via the web really something new, or is it merely a more electronically efficient form of old media?
Young minds pondered, but no results emerged. ”Let’s explore it from the other end,” I suggested. ”What has made a real impact on you recently?”.
An enthusiastic answer came from one young man. His reply: ”I really got off on Naomi Klein’s book, No Logo. In fact, it affected him so much, he said, that he bent the captive ears of fellow students during an entire car journey from Grahamstown to Johannesburg.
It struck me how it was a book, not a web-wonder, which had had such a strong effect. Surely, the heart of interactivity has to be exactly this: an instance that makes for a memorable exchange of meaning when you’re trawling through a mass of media.
When engaging with content strikes a chord, there’s something deeper happening than whether you’ve moved a mouse or flipped a page. Maybe there are many things happening.
We’re talking about a multi-chemical fusion here, not some conveyor-belt that simply shifts content from medium to consumer.
Think about it. What transpires in a media interaction? Some people see a strong and unidirectional influence — a powerful message system imposing itself on innocent minds. Others counter that audiences are active and selective.
Both perspectives are right — sometimes media is stronger than minds; sometimes vice versa. We have diverse relationships with different media and different messages and at different times.
So where does interactivity come into this? It is there in moments within the multi-directional traffic between sender and receiver. It is when the two contrary flows meet halfway as equals. It is in the mix that new meanings are made, not merely extant sense being transferred.
Well, what do you think? Is it in such moments that interactivity hides? Can buttonless and linkless lines of text yield this result?
I don’t know. You tell me.
[email protected]
Guy Berger is head of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University and deputy chair of the South African National Editors Forum (Sanef). He was recently nominated for the World Technology Awards.