Sound machines, flesh machines and history engines

The word is out, and the word is wrong. 'Interactive is the wrong word' 1. This is Brian Eno's damning assessment of the state of CD-ROM technology. If interactivity is meant to imply some kind of conversation, some kind of mutual emergence between human and machine, then we simply do not have it. When it comes to describing the experience of fossicking around your average CD-ROM, stimulus-response would be a more germane concept.