Blog 3 Just flow man yeah!

"See its all about flow dude, you've just got to imerse yourself into the zone and shut out all other influences yeah. Its all about feeding your mind without ruining the environment bro."

I'm not talking about drugs, i'm not on drugs either, in case you were wondering, no no no, this week in IMS we have looked at Mihali Cisikzentmihalis' flow theory and how it relates to users of interactive media.

According to the above theorist with the riddiculous name 'Flow is the process of optimal experience'. Hoffman and Novak (1996) suggest that 'the degree to which a users online experiences produces flow determines likelihood of continued use of the web."

Basically, the more imersed a person becomes in a website the more likely they are to want to return and use it again.

To experiment whether flow actually does occur when using the internet, we were set a group task. One member of the group would surf the web, the other members would be observers, with one observer looking at what the surfer was veiwing on the screen and how they were engaging with the website and the other observer looking at the surfers body language and facial experessions. A series of distractions orchestrated by the evil Molesworth were employed to see if the surfers could be taken out of thier transfixed states.

My group consisted of Ellie, Dan and Myself, Dan took the hotseat and volunteerd to be the surfer, I was in charge of looking at his onscreen behaviour and Ellie watched his every move. (spooky eh) Dan was set the task of finding a DVD recorder, he very quickly imersed himself in the task and was soon systematically looking through reveiw websites, price comparison sites and online stores to find the best deal and the best product. He actually began to create his own personal data sheet, by copying text from reveiws and product information from the store sites into a word document. The only distraction which got Daniels attention was when Mike kicked a bin across the room, this proved that Dan had easilly imeresed himself into the task and it took a great deal to bring him back into the real world. Ellie noticed that his face expressed extreme concentration, and he appeared oblivious to being watched, she also noticed that on some occasions he physically moved himself closer to the screen when he needed to input information or when he was reading an interesting article.

Although we all concluded that this experiment had its limitations due to its lab style environment, it was clear that Dan had experenced some level of flow and that Hoffman and Novaks hypothesis, may carry some weight.

See you next time

Blog 2 The Sequel

To recap in the last episode Ed explained that the evil Mike Molesworth had requested a blog from the entire IMS group and anti-blogger Ed had been forced to become a nerd against his wishes. Will Ed, resist the temptation to become a geek? or will he, back down to pressure and lose any shred of cool he may have had? (judging by this introduction, all is lost).

Rite time to use this blogging thing for summat useful.

In our last IMS seminar, we were requested to veiw a website and based on the framework for the analysis of interactive content (Hoffman and Novak 1996) judge whether the site was interactive or not. We were also asked to consider if being interactive was important for all websites.

My group studied www.leoburnett.com, before reading the next paragraph, I make the polite suggestion that you visit the website.

The website appears interactive as it has been built in flash and therefore has lots of clickable icons, the cursor is a pencil which draws pencil lines wherever you drag the mouse and there is an 8 ball which you can 'shoot' in various directions depending upon where you click the mouse upon its surface and the site is also alive with video and audio content. Seems interactive enough, but is it?

How interactive is the Leo Burnett website?


1. Number or linked sources = ZERO

2. Communication Model = One to Many (not interactive)

3. Feedback Symmetry = One E-mail contact link.

4. Range of multimedia = High, Text, Graphics, Sound and video all present.


After analysing the site using the Hoffman and Novak model, we realised that the only interactive elements were the graphics, video and audio on the site. Visitors of the leo burnett website are just veiwers they are not participants, they cannot change the way the site looks, they cannot add content to the site, they cannot even supply feedback to improve the site. Through performing this excersise we realised that the word 'interactive' is too readily used to describe sites that have dynamic graphical content rather than sites where participation is possible and the term would be more appropriate.

Do leo burnett really need a truely interactive website?

Leo burentt use their site as a showcase of their work and thier creative talents, they use it to show off, and to communicate thier values and heritige. We concluded that the site is merely there, to be there, to add value to the Leo Burnett brand and to make sure that the company have an online presence.

Thats all for this Blog. See you soon

First Post

Lets start by being honest, this whole blogging thing has never really apealed to me for two reasons, the first being that I belive anybody who sets up a diary about themselves which anybody can read must have the ego the size of North America. The second being that my life at the moment doest really rate writing about, I'm not depressed, or unhappy, or feel that something is missing, its just that i'm a student, I do student stuff, I study, I get drunk and I windsurf. I'm very happy doing all of those things (maybe not the studying) but I dont feel the urge to write about what I get up to in order to feel like i'm adding something to the global community,I have always been certain that the global community has got along just fine without me.

So what the hell am I doing writing this?

Blame rests squarely with a Mr Mike Molesworth, Interactive Media Studies Lecturer extraordinare at Bournemouth University. As part of our module he has requsted that we all set up a blog, his reasoning behind this was that as students of interactive media we would not really be able to comment on online communities, blogs etc unless we actually got our hands dirty and got involved in them, so following the dont knock it till youve tried it school of thought, here it is, my first ever blog!