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At the close of the first US season of Big Brother host Julie Chen warmly
praised the audience for its role in shaping the outcome: "Your
participation made this truly an interactive show," she told viewers; "You
changed the lives of 10 people." Critics argued that if the audience
deserved credit for shaping the show (by deciding the order in which cast
members would be banished from the Big Brother house), they also shouldered
at least part of the blame for the dull and uninspired result. The problem,
as producers admitted to the New York Times (Carter), was that the audience
kept voting off the more controversial and abrasive cast members, with the
result that Big Brother failed to provide the minimum of conflict, crisis,
and sexual tension necessary for prime-time success.
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The show’s lukewarm US reception thus confronted producers with the conundrum of interactivity: what if audience participation resulted in a show the audience was no longer interested in watching? Since the US debut of Big Brother was disappointingly received (insofar as it failed to live up to the format’s success abroad), there was some discussion as to whether CBS would bring the show back for a second season. When it did, predictably, the central interactive element had been omitted: the audience would no longer decide whom to banish. Instead, the show adopted the proven formula of the smash hit Survivor: cast members would vote each other off, thereby presumably insuring that the schemers and manipulators would last longer and continue to fuel the plot with intrigue and tension.
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The case of the US version of Big Brother highlights the problematic nature of the democratizing promise of interactivity in the era of the so-called information revolution. The ubiquitous lowercase "i" prefix has become the marketing symbol of the turn of the millennium: companies producing everything from footwear to football games hope to profit from reports of the imminent demise of the mass market. From a marketing standpoint, the promise of interactivity is not unrelated to the appeal of the bank machine (which, if it were implemented a bit later, surely would have been dubbed the iBank): it offloads work to the consumer. In an increasingly ‘nichified’ and customized market, detailed information about consumer preferences and habits is an increasingly important economic resource, as evidenced by the proliferation of database collection (and database mining). Interactivity allows consumers themselves to do the work of providing this information. At the extreme, interactivity ties a particular act of production to a guaranteed act of consumption. In exchange, consumers are promised a degree of control over the production process: that power over the means of production will, in effect, be shared. In the US, for example, early advertisements for customized digital TV portrayed a group of heavies throwing a TV executive out the window. No longer would consumers be “told” by network executives what to watch when. The new technology would be their digital servant, going out and finding the types of shows they liked to watch and recording and storing the content until the master was ready to watch.
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One danger of the promise of interactivity as a form of power sharing is that it might be taken a bit too literally. Arguably, this is what happened in the case of Big Brother. The standard explanation for the fact that viewers chose to vote out the characters who might have kept the show controversial and interesting is that they voted with “more with their hearts than with their tastes” (Carter). However, my own study of Big Brother fans suggests an additional explanation: viewers took the show’s claim to “reality” literally, and used their vote to rid the show of cast members who were too patently phony and manipulative (the same cast members the producers felt would provide conflict and drama). A more generalizable result of the promise of interactivity was that fans rebelled when they felt that their own control had been superceded - as when, for example, a local radio station mounted a free call-in voting campaign in support of a cast member who came from the area. In response to this “tampering” with the voting process, several fans attempted to organize a boycott of the show and its advertisers online. The boycott appeared to have little or no affect on the show, but it highlighted the potential pitfall of interactivity: that viewers might start to believe they’re entitled to exercise the control they’ve been promised.
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To the extent that it becomes clear interactivity may not live up to the promise of power sharing (and it is perhaps telling that, in the US, the deployment of the promise of de-centralization via interactivity has coincided with an unprecedented level of merger activity), consumers may well start to see certain forms of interactivity the same way producers do: as consumer labor. Additionally, the promise of interactivity mobilizes a retroactive critique of mass society while working at the same time to extend its reach. This critique is summed up by the recurring theme of the celebrants of the so-called information revolution: that the homogenization and top-down control characteristic of industrial mass production are rapidly becoming relics of a pseudo-totalitarian past. A recent New York Times article about interactive television suggested, for example, that the technology represented “the beginning of the end of another socialistic force in American life: the mass market” (Lewis). In New York Timesspeak, of course, “socialist” means totalitarian. The result is a “now-it-can-be-told” narrative: the mass market, that great ideological foe of centralized planning, is revealed as yet another form of social control. We can admit that the Frankfurt School was right after all, thanks to the added hindsight provided by the promise of an interactive, customized, information society. Once again, to the extent that the promise of mass society’s self-overcoming turns out to be a ruse of its further proliferation, this promotional strategy runs the danger of backfiring. If online interactivity ends up serving primarily to continue the progress of niche marketing and Sloanism that accompanied the mass market from its inception, the retroactive critique becomes a contemporary critique.
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All of which is to suggest that - to get back to the example of the US version of Big Brother - it is perhaps not unlikely that we will, in coming years, see the deployment of the revolutionary promise of interactivity rescinded, or perhaps reformulated. In its current form the promise relies too heavily on a critique that can be turned against the commercial interests it serves. As for the reformulation of interactivity, it seems not unreasonable to expect a turn toward what might be called, borrowing a term from Zizek (and redefining it): interpassivity. Whereas Zizek uses the term to refer to the process whereby new technologies take on the subjective burden of passivity, I use the term here to designate the process whereby submitting to certain forms of unobtrusive monitoring replaces what is now dubbed interactivity. This is the direction taken by MIT’s Oxygen Project (http://oxygen.lcs.mit.edu/) -- which bills itself as a strategy for “enabling people ‘to do more while doing less’”. In certain instances, rather than inviting users to self-consciously engage an interactive interface, the goal of the Oxygen Project is to make the interface as invisible and ubiquitous as air. Interactivity turns into interpassivity: the intrusion of the interface is minimized to the point that it becomes automatic.
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For example, “intelligent spaces” would track user movements, opening doors, and adjusting environmental conditions accordingly. The “active” component of the interaction is taken on by the computer, which monitors our activities, coming to know our movements, preferences, needs, and so on ‘better than we do ourselves.’ From a marketing perspective, the advantages are the same as in the case of interactivity: detailed information can be gathered about consumers who are “doing more by doing less”. Once their shopping habits are established, for example, the act of shopping can be automated: groceries can be purchased when an “intelligent” kitchen realizes that supplies are running low. The “friction” of the consumer is removed as the consumption process is automated. Moreover, the incitation to activity and the attendant promise of shared control are defused to the extent that the computer takes on the active role. The consumer is no longer explicitly invited - as in the discourse of interactivity - to take on an increasingly participatory role, and the promise of automation ensures that interpassivity doesn’t feel like work. At the extreme, the intrusion of interactivity should disappear. Big Brother fans will participate not by voting on the show’s outcome, but via the unobtrusive monitoring built into the digital TV that keeps track of when they’re watching - perhaps even when they get up, or go to the bathroom, or fall asleep. The transparent consumer emerges against the background of the invisible interface.
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8 | | Works Cited
Carter, B. “Big Brother hopes to engineer an exit, then add a face,” The New York Times. (Sept 4 2000)
Lewis, M. “Boombox,” The New York Times Magazine. (Aug 13 2000)
Zizek, S. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997
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9 | | Citation reference for this article
MLA style:
Mark Andrejevic. "The pacification of interactivity" M/C Reviews 25 Oct. 01. [your date of access] <http://www.media-culture.org.au/reviews/features/interactive/mandrejevic.html>.
Chicago style:
Mark Andrejevic, "The pacification of interactivity," M/C Reviews 25 Oct. 01, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/reviews/features/interactive/mandrejevic.html> ([your date of access]).
APA style:
Mark Andrejevic. (2001) The pacification of interactivity. M/C Reviews 25 Oct. 01. <http://www.media-culture.org.au/reviews/features/interactive/mandrejevic.html> ([your date of access]). | |
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