RELATIONAL MEDIATISATION

As was the case for concepts like media and technologies, interactivity is not an easily defined term. It is closely related to the idea of interaction, in the way this concept has been investigated in the frame of social anthropology studies on interaction (see mainly Goffman, Watzlawick and Weakland). It is also bound to the notions of inter-relation or of verbal interactions studied by linguistics and pragmatics. Consequently, it is included in a heterogeneous semantic web of contrasting notions :

• active vs. passive;
• unidirectional vs. multi-directional;
• exchange, dialogue, conversation vs. passive reception (Rabaté, Lauraire, 1985).

Since this definition has a high degree of extensiveness, it can take into account extreme situations from the social bond constitutive of interactivity, on one hand, to the mere exchange of informations between to machines, on the other[9]. According to Sansot, interactivity seems to designate "... rather an instrumental relationship between humans and machines under control of a request for information" (1985:87). In this perspective, interactivity is bound to the field of human-to-machine interactions, leaving the characterisation of human-to-human relationships between speakers in the realm of inter-relations. This classification is reminiscent of the distinctions made between two forms of interactivity and stands very much at the core of relational mediation procedures such as functional interactivity and intentional interactivity (Barchechath et Pouts-Lajus, 1990). Other authors describe the same kind of distinctions with, respectively, the qualifiers of transitive and intransitive interactivity (Chateau, 1990; Jacquinot, 1993-b).

Let's first elucidate functional interactivity . This category encompasses the interactions between a machine and its user. Said in more technical terms, this kind of interactivity manages the human-to-machine interface. It describes how far the learner may interact with a machine and its software. Those of you who are familiar with computer software or with arcade games very well know that the degree of liberty allowed to the user as well as the possibilities offered by any given software vary quite a lot. By analogy, this kind of interactivity has been applied and extended to a variety of situations present in CAI. From our point of view, a printed document or a television broadcast present a very small component of functional interactivity. How can it manifest itself ? What is meant here as interactivity includes the various clues that help the learner during his browsing of a given document and depicts the tools that may assist him in managing and constructing his scrutiny of mediatised documents. It becomes thus apparent that for a written text or a printed document an important constituent of functional interactivity lies in page layout and typesetting properties - Netchine-Grynberg's "mise en page" - as well as in the visualisation of a text's conceptual structures through sripto-visual attributes such as text formalisation and typographic arrangement - Netchine-Grynberg's "mise en texte" or 'textual' layout - (Netchine-Grynberg, Netchine, 1991).

A second category of interactivity is what we just called intentional interactivity. We are dealing here with communication taking place between an author and his public. It seeks to describe the re-construction of a dialogue situation between a physically absent author who however manifests his presence by the imprint he left on the software utilised and his interlocutor. Said otherwise, intentional interactivity is made up of a simulated dialogue within an interactive communication situation: without it, off-line communication would seem completely anonymous and disembodied. Of course, we are here not dealing with a real dialogue, since a distance course situation is a unidirectional communication setting: the recipients can't answer the emitter. Still, the imprint left by the author, the way he catches the attention of the recipient, how he addresses and involves him, all these features represent an essential way of formalising the mediated relation. A last remark: in this very case, the term of interaction is better suited than interactivity, because this term clearly evokes the dialogue and relational dimensions of an interactive situation. By developing the so-called conative functions of a discourse (the terms applies to the effect-causing features of a linguistic utterance on the listener) as well as by unfolding the expressive and phatic (by the setting up of a communication channel) properties of communication, a situation of genuine intercommunication is de facto restored (Jackobson, 1963).

With these point in mind, television and video programs may seem less interactive than the computer when considered at a functional level. TV broadcasts and video programs may however be more interactive than some computer software packages, when seen as items of intentional interactivity. Indeed, TV can be pretty involving for the learner if the sensory, affective and intellectual activities developed by the recipient to interpret the message received are taken into account. Intentional interactivity can originate in the constructive recognition the receiver has to perform in order to acknowledge fully the particular context-setting at work in TV programs: a process standing at the very core of the sender/recipient duality (Meunier, Peraya 1993). On the other hand, a number of computer software packages display very little intentional interactivity, even if, studied from a functional point of view, they may appear to be functioning satisfactorily.

Finally, one may find kinds of interaction pretty close to situations of face to face communication thanks to various technologies of distance or 'tele-presence', like audio and video conferencing. A number of research results have demonstrated that, in this case, the communication process is characterised by an important loss of information, principally of analogue and non-verbal kind such as gestures and glances which play a crucial role in social rituals like, for instance, those at work in giving the floor to someone during a face to face conference (Perrin et Gensolen, 1992).

As a provisional hypothesis, we might suggest the following table outlining the main distinctive features of interaction[10]:

Interrelation	Intentional interactivity	Functional interactivity
H/H face to face	H/H at a distance	H/M face to face
Tele-presence	Dialogue settings including the receiver; constructed relationships	Manipulation

Table 3: Forms of interactivity