Water Cooler

Most of us have, at times, encountered some words that gain such popular usage that they begin to grow outside of their normal rightful meaning, until they become so lacking in specific meaning that they are rendered worthless. I witnessed this abuse recently, sadly at the hands of our own profession, with a word that has suffered much at the hands of our internet-driven culture. The word: "interactive."

Indeed, "interactive" is a word that has gotten a lot of mileage lately, with electronic media gaining momentum in both their efficiency and popularity. According to Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, as long ago as 1984 the word "interactive" meant "of, or relating to, or being a two-way electronic communication system . . . that involves a user's orders . . . or responses." This definition was of course in addition to its main definition of "mutually or reciprocally active." Interactivity and technology have been together for quite some time, at least as long as programmers discovered that computers could provide marvelous entertainment, in the form of user-controlled moving lights on a display interacting with computer-controlled lights, preferably to the accompaniment of loud noises. However, once our culture begin to adopt a "Personal Computer on Every Desk" culture, the love of that which is interactive took off.

I was reading a description for a workshop in the approaching annual meeting of a shall-not-be-named professional organization, and the description said that the workshop would include "an interactive discussion." Something immediately sounded false with that statement. After all, isn't every discussion interactive? I had believed that interactivity was what separated a discussion from a lecture. I'm not sure what we accomplish by pointing out that our discussions are "interactive," except perhaps drawing the attention of those who enjoy tech-tinged buzzwords.

So let's give interactivity a much-needed rest. No more talk of "interactive workshops," "interactive software," "interactive classrooms," "interactive dating," or even "interactive discussions." No self-respecting librarian is without a thesaurus, and I think we can do better.