Interactivity (Audience)

Interactivity occurs when a receiver responds to a sender. Depending on the medium used, the level of interaction can take place in several contexts: one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many. Audience interactivity is commonly associated with new media technologies but not necessarily limited to that (e.g. an audience attending a public speech interacts with the speaker in many ways). Currently, however, the concept of interactivity is one of the fundamental attributes of new communication technologies that enable parties to exchange messages and otherwise engage one another.

Generally, interactivity occurs in two technological areas: human-computer interactivity (HCI) and computer-mediated interactivity. Human-computer interactivity is the interaction a user has with technology, such as a website. In public relations, human-computer interactivity is often concerned with a visitor's ability to navigate through an organization's website or mobile application, called the “user experience” or user interactivity (UI). Computer-mediated interactivity, is the interaction individuals have with other human beings through computer-mediated channels.

Social media is an example of computer-mediated communications in public relations where organizational representatives interact with individuals and publics through blogs, social networking sites, instant messaging systems, and so forth. Thus, computer-mediated interactivity involves the content of messages that individuals and organizations share when exchanging information about individuals, organizations, or activist groups on websites and social media platforms.

Initial conceptualizations of interactivity were based on the new communication technologies of the 1990s. The understanding of interactivity first focused on the technical features that allowed users to communicate through networked computers beyond spatial temporal boundaries. Like other concepts related to technology, the evolution of interactivity transformed in tandem with new media tools.

Since then, two conceptions of interaction have emerged (Sundar, Kalyanaraman, & Brown, 2003). First, the functional view focuses on technical features that facilitate sender and receiver interaction. Examples of technical interactive features include hyperlinks and comment sections that allow users to send feedback to a site's host. The comment sections on websites are functionally interactive for visitors (receivers) and provide feedback to the sender (the website host). In the second conception, the message-centered approach, contingent interactivity considers whether a message is the center of the interaction. In a contingent interaction, the sender and the receiver exchange roles. The sender becomes the receiver and vice versa. Twitter, for example, which is functionally interactive, becomes contingently interactive when the sender of a tweet receives a reply to the original tweet. The interaction is contingent on the original tweet (message) and the tweets (messages) that follow.

Interactivity plays a significant and often unrecognized role in public relations. Theoretically, interactivity provided organizations and publics with the same technical base. Through interactive features, publics are capable of interacting directly with organizations and with other individuals and publics. Consider, for instance, the current phenomenon of organizations engaging with stakeholders on Facebook and Twitter. Organizations respond to individuals’ messages posted on social media sites. These messages are not always directed at an organization but are identified through the organization's social media monitoring based on its scanning for key terms. While organizations and publics or stakeholder groups have equivalent functional tools to interact, organizations are typically privileged with more resources to engage stakeholders on social media sites. Publics and stakeholder groups with fewer resources to monitor and develop an engagement strategy are forced to interact in a predetermined fashion. In the case of smaller organizations, interactivity through social media is reified differently than corporations. Interactivity with smaller organizations becomes linked with interpersonal interactions and bridges online and offline relationships.

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