The Attraction of Interactive Communication is that it is a return to the

prehistoric human fascination with telling tales!

Since the beginnings of any civilized society the market place was the hub of

civilization, a place to which traders returned from remote lands with exotic

spices, silks, monkeys, parrots, jewels - and fabulous stories. Interactive

Communication, properly executed, more resembles an ancient bazaar than fits the

business models companies try and impose upon it.

People respond to interactive

opportunities because it seems to offer some intangible quality

long missing in action from modern life. In sharp contrast to the alienation

wrought by homogenized broadcast media, interactive opportunities provide a

space in which the human voice would be rapidly rediscovered.

Unlike the lockstep conformity imposed by television, advertising, and

corporate propaganda, interactive communication gives new legitimacy and free

rein to play.

People long for more connection between what we do for a living and what we

genuinely care about. We long for release from anonymity, to be seen as who we

feel ourselves to be rather than the sum of abstract metrics and parameters.

We long to be part of a world that makes sense rather than accept the

accidental alienation imposed by market forces too large to grasp; to even

contemplate.

Remember the market place, of old. Caravans arrived across burning deserts

dates and figs, snakes and parrots, monkeys, strange music and stranger tales.

The market place was the heart of the city, the kernel, the hub.Like the

past and the future it stood at the crossroads.

People worked early and went there for coffee and vegetables, eggs and wine,

for pots and carpets.

They went there to look and listen and to marvel, to buy and to be amused.

But mostly they went to meet each other to talk and interact! Markets are

conversations.

So what went so horribly wrong? From the perspective of corporations, many of

which by the twentieth century had become bigger and more powerful than ancient

city-states, nothing went wrong. Things did change however.

Commerce is a natural part of human life but is has become increasingly

unnatural over the intervening centuries, gradually divorcing itself from the

very people on whom it depends, whether workers or customers. The result has

been to create a huge chasm between buyers and sellers. Advertising's

failure!

Conventional advertising has failed the natural human need for social

interaction. We have created a media society during the last 30 or 40 years

where there is an extraordinary reduction in interaction because of the one-way

and more passive form of information that exists. People desire to be taken

account of, to affect change, learn and personalize their relationships with

their environment. These psychological and sociological factors are part of the

incentive to interact with advertising. However, these tend to be minimized in

the incentive direct response field, there are a phenomenal number of reasons

which cause people to interact which go beyond just giving them things.