What is interactivity?

We often talk about ?being interactive? on the Web, but what does that really mean? Many journalists talk about ?interactivity? as polls, quizzes, clickable graphics and multimedia presentations with multiple paths the viewer selects. Jeff Jarvis challenges that definition of interactivity on BuzzMachine.com: ?What bugs me is that all this fancy Flash to try to show off and supposedly involve readers only involves them in the stories, not in the action. That is to say, so a thousand people come in and play a sim-Sim game to fix some problem but it ends there?. I don’t call that interactivity. Interactivity is people interacting with people. In this new medium that the audience owns, it’s about — pardon me for repeating myself — the people finally having a voice. It’s about us in big media listening. News is a conversation.?