| Chapter 2: | The Internet as an Object of Study |
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and Stromer-Galley (2000), who differentiated human-to-human and human-to-media interaction. Yet, while these broader distinctions help our understanding of interactivity, they did not reach far enough, and for this reason, McMillan's argumentation, which led her to differentiate between three constructs, is examined further here.
McMillan (2004) described the first category as user-to-user interaction, in other words computer-mediated communication (CMC), which focuses on how individuals interact. Moreover, user-to-documents interactivity is defined as the interaction with documents or document creators, and user-to-system interactivity as the interaction between people and the computer itself. For all three categories, she stressed the importance of considering the locus of control between user and communicator, or human and system, as this in turn influences the nature of the interaction. Conceptually, whether looking at user-to-user, user-to-documents, or user-to-system interaction, the focus in all cases is on utilising an interface in order to interact. Furthermore, in the context of this study, interactivity included at least three levels that needed to be studied:
In line with the definitions put forth by McMillan (2004), as well as by employing a concept of interactivity proposed by Rafaeli and Sudweeks (1998), Tremayne and Dunwoody (2001) side with Rafaeli and Sudweeks in regarding interactivity as a ‘process-related construct about communication’ (p. 114). Thus, interactivity is defined as a process in which each party responds to the other in a meaningful way. But while this definition has been employed in various other studies (Rafaeli & Sudweeks, 1998; Sundar, Brown, & Kalyanaraman, 1999), the operationalisation has