Is Interactivity the New Passivity?

Passive consumption of TV has long been identified with mass stupefaction, conformity, and passivity. And "interactivity" - e.g., touching and swiping, uploading and other forms of "participation" - has been heralded as an antidote to the alienation of the modern world.

In an intriguing April 9th, 2012 Flow TV post, Jonathan Sterne suggests that the acts of production and interconnection associated with interactivity might just be other modes of (soul-destroying?) consumerism.

Here are some excerpts from Jonathan Sterne's provocative essay:

"It is not just so-called social media (a misnomer if there ever was one—since all media are by definition social). Magazines and newspapers implore us to write back and explore on multiple platforms. TV shows ask us to go online and participate in discussions and games, books get their own Facebook pages where readers are asked to “like” them, software companies put together “street teams” of users willing to promote them in a manner analogous to what concert promoters used to do...

[T]he goal of most institutions during the broadcast era was to produce measurable audiences for sale to advertisers. It was to attract attention. In that sense, there is a smooth continuity with the internet era, where media organizations also hope to produce attention that can then be parlayed into one or another form of market value. When people’s participation becomes someone else’s business—and here I mean business in the market-share and moneymaking sense of the term—the social goods that are supposed to come with it can be compromised...

There are some great things to be found in a more apparently participatory culture, and certainly there are even more great things in cheap access to the means of dissemination...[but the] demand to participate can become coercive, exhausting the very collective faculties it officially celebrates. While interactivity can be imagined as the “like” or “retweet,” it also encompasses the “agree to terms” button...

This is not to say all participation is bad, any more than it is to say that all consumption was bad in the golden age of mass culture criticism. Neither activity nor passivity are goods in themselves; both have roles to play in culture, politics and personal life...

What if—from time to time—we chose not to identify with the interactive promise of new media platforms or for that matter new media art? What if, when the new media savants lambast so-called old media audiences as denizens of passivity and ideology, we say, “yes, that’s me”?"