Michelle Henning reminds us, however that interactivity has its darker side. She cites Lev Manovich’s concern that computer technology plays into a "modern desire to externalize the mind."
Computer interactivity maps our own thought processes onto those already written into the software. It models certain ways of thinking, or certain ways of understanding our own cognitive practices: to click is to make a choice, to follow a link, to associate one event of piece of information with another. This process of the “externalization” of the mind closes the gap between subjective mental processes and objective, machinic processes. In this sense, like Taylorism, it hooks people and bodies up to machines, making people “thinglike.” This argument would suggest that interactivity, which seemed initially to promise agency over “numbed passivity,” actually does the opposite, increasing alienation.[40]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Manovich
