Lo simbólico y el lenguaje

Interactivity has the potential to alleviate problems such as the information overload mentioned earlier: layering (user-to-site interactivity) can provide users with more choice over the amount of content that they access, as well as the level of depth/detail that they reach to. Moreover, interactivity can be conceptualised in a broader way, i.e. as the establishment of an affective bond between the user and the site, issue or organisation and can, thus, be a very empowering and effective mobilisation strategy.

It was shown in Chapter 6 that the civic organisations sampled are not utilising the internet to its full potential in order to engage (with) users. The findings of the user evaluations concur with this view: participants perceived all sites as low on interactivity (see Table 11), although there was significant variance in the way that users understood, interpreted and defined interactivity. This coincides with considerable confusion in the

scholarly literature about the scope, definition and typologies of interactivity (see Leiner and Quiring 2008, cf. Richards 2006). Our participants’ notions of interactivity ranged from the mere use of multimedia features, such as video clips, to segmentation of content according to target group, to user-to-user interaction on message boards and forums, to user-to-producers interaction using real time chat tools. This variance is in itself interesting and telling about the catch-all nature of the concept of interactivity, which has occupied scholars for as long there has been online interaction (see Newhagen and Rafaeli 1996).

While factors such as ease of use and relevance of content dominated the written

evaluations and group discussions, interactivity was a subtly recurring theme, not least in users’ favourite site elements (Table 14) and wish list of features (Table 15). It is

particularly interesting, however, that participants rarely, if at all, referred to interactivity as a stand-alone concept per se. They usually approached it by proxy, i.e. through talking about other major civic factors and in particular efficacy. That is to say, users made a direct link between online interactivity and civic efficacy:

“I think if people really can actually make a difference, like with voting… if you can vote on a website I’d probably be more inclined to actually go and think that I’m actually making a difference rather than just read and yet you’re thinking “ok…” – you know what I mean?

So, I suppose it’s like… interacting with the… website” (#2.11-BS).

“I liked [the Soil Association website] but I didn’t think there was, like, interactive enough, it didn’t really- it presented the issue to me, but it didn’t like encourage me to take it any further, if you know what I mean” (#4.38-BP).

Previous studies (e.g. Sundar, Kalyanaraman and Brown 2003; Warnick, Xenos, Endres and Gastil 2006) have shown that “increased interactivity is associated with increased satisfaction, a greater sense of self-efficacy, and higher memory, among other things”

(Sundar et al. 2003: 35) and users’ responses fully reiterated these causal links.

Furthermore, Vyas, Heylen, Ellëns and Nijholt (2007: 7) note that providing users with an opportunity to be creative and active and to go beyond just receiving information

enhances their aesthetic experiences, which was also confirmed by our data, as users thought that interactive features were both more enjoyable and more engaging.

Finally, participants expressed a preference for user-led interactive spaces, such as forums and message boards, which allow for the creation of user review reputation systems, e.g. by giving feedback on sustainable farmers so as “to see who does what – are they actually doing anything that is recommended on the page? Are they actually buying from local suppliers? What are they feeling about it?” (#2.16-KK on the Meatrix).

Such spaces can act not only as mechanisms of scrutiny but also as civic communities with spill-over benefits on political socialisation and sophistication.

Despite these benefits and user preferences, a comparison of users’ feedback on major aspects across the sampled sites shows that interactivity was by far the weakest element of all four sites (Table 12). This was despite the existence of isolated interactive tools, such as Friends of the Earth’s vote feature and various postcode-based search engines.

Fairtrade’s somewhat higher score on the sense of community could possibly be

attributed to the personalised case studies mentioned earlier. If confirmed, this could constitute a very interesting finding because it might indicate that a sense of community can be achieved not only through resource-intensive technological applications, but through a more personalised and individualised discourse.

The observed lack of interactivity on these four sites is consistent with previous studies, such as Burt and Taylor (2008: 1058), whose evaluation of environmental, civil rights and other voluntary organisations’ websites showed “little evidence of inclination to nurture the ‘Habermasian’ public sphere” although in theory such an approach should be

consistent with the philosophy of these organisations. A typical example of this paradox is The Meatrix blog: several users commented negatively on the fact that the blog’s posts were not followed by any comments (e.g. #2.16-KK: “nobody would respond to it –

nobody talks about it”). One user thought that it was “quite impersonal… like just a news story” (#3.35-TM), while another remarked that “there wasn’t actually any real, personal comments… it was just like campaigning” (#3.22-HM).

This raises a crucial point that emerged earlier (Chapter 5) and resurfaced in this part of the study, namely, young people’s wish to listen to both sides of an argument, especially insofar as civic issues are concerned. Having browsed through the four sites, and having processed the arguments in favour of practices such as fairtrade, organic farming and sustainable energy, participants probed the organisations’ messages noting, for instance, that “there wasn’t the other side of the argument, so it was very one-sided, because obviously if we all would now go to family farms we would not have enough meat” (#2.16-KK).

This issue is particularly crucial and concurs with Warnick et al (2006) who found that

“end-users of political websites are just as likely to perceive the rhetorical features of site content as they are the feature-based aspects as interactive”. That is to say, while a balance between fact and opinion or the consideration of counter-arguments may not be traditionally considered as relevant to the established notion of website interactivity, real-life users in fact make such a connection. This illustrates the difference between

traditional usability per se and civic usability and could indicate that a solution to the problem of online community is not necessarily a technological one. It could be argued that a more dialectical approach to online political communication would be more favourably received by younger users. Our data strongly indicates that addressing the counter-argument head-on can be a much more effective way for organisations to persuade and mobilise citizens, as opposed to ignoring the opposition altogether.

The importance of including the other side of the argument for an organisation’s own legitimacy, as well as for the deliberative health of the online public sphere, is also noted by Burt and Taylor (2008). In their model for the evaluation of voluntary sector / NGO websites, they note that reports, briefings and case studies allow organisations “to publish arguments and evidence that challenge their claims and to respond to these within the ‘public space’” (2008: 1053). Such practice is not good only for the health of the democracy in an abstract way; it actually empowers citizens to engage cognitively

with an issue, as well as providing them with arguments that they can then exercise in their own conversations with their immediate social environment.

Furthermore, a number of studies have shown that too much interactivity can distract users from the substance of the message that the site is trying to put across. Warnick, Xenos, Endres and Gastil (2006) showed that the co-occurrence of both campaign-to-user and text-based (rhetorical) interactivity can have a sensory overload effect that distracts users from the text of the site and has a negative impact on users’ recall of issue stances. Sundar et al. (2003: 49) add that “there exists such a thing as too much interactivity. Participants in the high-interactivity condition of our experiment consistently gave lower ratings than their counterparts in the other two conditions on a number of impression formation items”. This could be attributed to the fragmentation of information, which requires greater clicking effort on the part of the user.

Therefore, interactivity does not have be as resource-intensive as it may be feared by resource-pressed charities and NGOs. A more open-ended discourse incorporating visual elements and an emphasis on specific individuals and localities may be more effective in engaging users than a taxing set of flashy gadgets that can end up having an adverse effect. Acknowledging counter-arguments and featuring stories of real people are both considered as key elements in developing an interactive relationship between the site and the visitor. The existence of a genuinely interactive mode of civic

communication seems to be a decisive factor when it comes to following up a site visit with action (what is also known as goal conversion) and also in bringing users back to the site.

7.8 “Following Up” and “Going Back”

While, as it was explained earlier, our participants expressed broadly favourable views of the four sites, there is an important gap between liking a site and completing actions or revisiting. It is true that a few of the users in our sample engaged in action during the actual evaluation visit (e.g. registered for newsletters, assimilated information etc). A comparison of the quantitative data across sites shows that Friends of the Earth was more successful in motivating our participants, as the mean likelihood of following up the visit was higher for that site across almost all civic activities measured (Table 17). This could be attributed to a number of pre-existing factors, namely familiarity with the FoE brand and interest in the issue of climate change, or it may also be due to the range of participation and follow-up tools available on the FoE site.

Moreover, a comparison of the mean likelihood of following up across civic activities shows that sites were generally more successful in raising long-term awareness and interest for the causes that they promoted, rather than persuading users to complete specific short-term site tasks, such as donating or registering (Table 17).

Still, the qualitative responses on the likelihood of returning to the sites were mixed and there were some instances during the focus group discussions of participants admitting