It may not be like a visit to the doctor, but it gets awfully close. When you visit the popular medical information website WebMD.com, you can point to where it hurts: clicking on a graphic representation of a human body part produces a pop-up list of possible ailments, with links to suggested courses of action.
Interactive experiences like this one are the defining feature of the online experience. When we're online, we're busy—entering search terms, clicking through menu options, following links. But how does this interactive format affect our ability to process the information we find online? Brian Southwell, assistant professor and director of graduate studies in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, decided to find out.
We often think of the Web's interactive nature as a boon: you see what you want to see and can by-pass the dull or the irrelevant. But Southwell hypothesized that the interactivity that makes the Web so appealing might be the very thing that derails our search, interfering with our understanding and retention of the information we find.
In an experiment conducted in collaboration with Mira Lee of Michigan State University, Southwell presented subjects with an interactive and non-interactive version of a documentary program interspersed with public service announcements. One group of subjects had no control over the content they were shown: they had to watch the presentation from beginning to end.
Members of another group, however, had a different experience. In a format that mimicked the Web's interactive environment, they were presented with clickable images of the different segments of the program. While they had to watch all of the segments, they could do so in any order. They were also allowed to fast-forward, stop, pause, and rewind the program.
Interviewing the subjects a week later, Southwell and Lee found that those who interacted more with the content were less able to recall the details of an especially complex public service announcement than those who simply watched the program from start to finish. (Memory differences between groups did not show up for a relatively simple public service announcement, suggesting that the effects increase with the complexity of information.)
“Interaction with user controls introduces yet another set of information with which a person must contend. While such controls likely afford certain pleasures and possibilities, they also introduce a processing burden,� the two concluded.
In other words, the bells and whistles of interactive platforms like the Internet can sometimes be a liability: we're so busy clicking that we're forgetting to do other things, like synthesizing, encoding, and storing the information that's popping up before us. “People talk about interactivity as inherently a good thing,� Southwell says. “But when it comes down to it, all that glitters is not gold in technology. You can have too much of a good thing.�
