ABSTRACT
THE original idea for this topic began as a response to remarks by advocates for new communication technologies and mass media reporters who called Telidon and the QUBE cable system “interactive” media and took it for granted that everyone shared a common meaning for the term. 1 The implication was that the “interactivity” of these media represented revolutionary breakthroughs that would radically improve human communication. Although both these media were potentially interactive (that is, they had the potential to allow mutual discourse through an electronic mail or conferencing service, and so on), their actual implementation (the user could only select once from a single group of options) was reactive or “pseudointeractive” at best.
