Interactivity: Reconceiving the audience in the struggle for textual 'control' of narrative and distribution

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which recent theorisations of interactivity work to reconceive the author-text-audience relationship. Suggesting that all media forms – historical and contemporary – can be reconceptualised in light of recent understandings of interactivity, I argue that control over the text and its narrative as mythically ‘finished’ products is struggled over between an authorial desire for finality and an audience desire for control over the arrangement, (re)configuration, and (re)distribution of the text. This struggle takes place across the sites of technological developments of textual control versus full interactivity, and in the realms of both media theory and media law.