Interactivity is as old as Gutenberg – it's just never had a voice before

There seems to be a widely held and virtually unchallenged belief that, thanks to the internet, the nature of mass communication has changed both radically and irrevocably. Well, yes, it has. And there again, no, it hasn't.

This, in only slightly exaggerated form, is how the argument seems to go.

Starting in 1440 with the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg, all significant power has been in the hands of the publisher, the transmitter, the controllers of media. For the next 550 years, audiences were no more than impotent and passive absorbers of broadcast messages. Mass communications were strictly one-way streets and every advance in technology put more and more power into the hands of the sender; not one empowered those insignificant receivers.

Newspaper magnates told their millions of mindless readers what to think, what to buy, how to vote; and the readers complied. The worldwide ratio of senders to receivers was 1: uncountable millions. Almost all mainstream advertising was based on the one-way model. Having established that if product claims were repeated relentlessly enough, people could remember them (a fact that could conveniently be measured) the model then leapt to a less solid conclusion: that simple recall of a reiterated phrase could have a beneficial effect on buying behaviour.

Underlying all this was the comforting knowledge that consumers were by and large docile creatures, almost deferentially pleased to accept advice and instruction from anyone with access to a loudhailer.

And so it remained, it is widely believed, until the advent of the internet began to redress the scandalous imbalance between sender and receiver. Only today are the first brave shoots of interactivity to be seen and welcomed, bringing a new sort of democracy to a long-deprived world.

The beady-eyed reader will have spotted immediately what I've done so far. I've elided, conflated, two totally different arguments as though they were part of the same whole. But at least I've done it deliberately, which is more than I can say for some.

Of course it's true – demonstrably, unarguably true – that for 500 years only a tiny minority of people has had access to those loudhailers: those printing presses, those transmitting stations. Indeed, it's still true.

But what has never been true is that mass communication both created and depended on an Admass: on a vast and passive homogenised audience.

Every individual receiver of every communication, irrespective of age or level of literacy, has always been an active participant in the communications process. Interactivity is no new phenomenon; it's just that the interactivity has been a private affair, taking place instinctively inside each individual head. Too often we've mistaken an enforced silence – since receivers had no access to their own loudhailers – for acceptance and compliance.

THE SERIOUS BUSINESS OF LAUGHTER

There's nothing remotely new about this observation. Arthur Koestler was writing about it at length in his strangely neglected 1960s book, The Act of Creation. Of all forms of communication, the one that he found most intriguing was humour. It's a brave man who sets out to explore the anatomy of humour, and Koestler was not noted for his lightness of touch. But humour attracted his attention for one excellent reason: it was the only form of communication that, if successful, elicited a demonstrable physiological response.

If we set out to move people to pity, or to understanding, or to desire we've no means of knowing whether we've succeeded or not:something may have happened inside those many receiving heads but we may never be certain. We can pretend to ourselves that we've achieved our objectives and no one can easily prove that we haven't. The professional comedian, however, is denied such comfort. The professional comedian either induces laughter – or not. There is a cruel, unequivocal finality about such judgements that is true of no other form of human communication. People laugh; or they don't laugh. No need to debate the issue.

And why do people laugh? Because 'they see the point'. It is the receiver's participation that triggers the response. Explain the point and receiver participation is thwarted; no one will laugh. Leave too wide a gap and receiver participation becomes impossible; no one will laugh. No proprietary communications research technique can begin to provide such an instant and unarguable verdict.

In one of his more memorable passages, Koestler writes: 'Language itself is never completely explicit. Words have suggestive, evocative powers; but at the same time are merely stepping stones for thought. The artist rules his subjects by turning them into accomplices.' That last sentence remains as good a job definition of the professional persuader as I know. (It's also, I think, what EH Gombrich, in Art & Illusion (1960) was getting at when he spoke of 'the beholder's share'.)

This is why the English language needs the word 'imply' as well as the word 'infer' – and why it's not just pedantic to groan when they're used interchangeably.

INTERACTION AND IMPLICATION

Examine those examples of marketing communications that you most admire. I bet you that none of them is totally explicit. I bet you that all of them reveal an understanding of creative receivers and make skilful use of them. I bet that all of them use implication rather than assertion – and trust their audience to make the planned, desired inference.

Of course it takes confidence. It seems to be risky because it is risky. Telling jokes is risky. When comedians fail to elicit laughter, they're said to have died. But they know that they're more likely to die by underrating their audiences than by overrating them. And the same is true for the humble marketer.

One of the many contributions that the amazing internet will make is to begin to provide loud-hailers for the hitherto deprived; so that we no longer have to guess, or rely on creaky research to discover, just exactly what's going on in those highly active and inventive minds that we spend so many millions addressing. At the very least, we shall have to stop pretending that nothing is.

FOOTNOTE

Oddly, not many people who study communications are very good communicators. It may be the translator's fault, but this is what a Spanish professor called JL Aranguren wrote in 1967: 'The emission does not always and inevitably lead to the simple, quiet and passive reception of a message, but frequently excites an active response: and for the same reason, this response may be in opposition to the emission instead of conforming with it.' No wonder his own message never got through.

This article featured in Market Leader, Winter 2006.