journal article: Political Candidate Campaign Web sites

Interesting article, althouhg I am unconvinced by the definisiton of text-based interactivity. Surely a text which indirectly invites a response, via first-second person and toungue-in-cheek images is _not_ interactivity, is it?

"Authors who write on Web style emphasize the importance of closely integrating the verbal and visual text in ways that are said to engage and hold readers' attention and keep them on the site"

Sounds more like 'engaging' to me, but alas, I'm no native speaker.

Decide for yourselves:

Effects of Campaign-to-User and Text-Based Interactivity in Political Candidate Campaign Web sites

Barbara Warnick
Michael Xenos
Danielle Endres
John Gastil

Department of Communication
University of Washington

Abstract

This study examined the effects on users of two forms of interactivity commonly found on political candidate campaign Web sites in the 2002 U.S. House election cycle. The first form, campaign-to-user interactivity, focuses on features or mechanisms used to enable or facilitate communication between site users and the campaign. The second form, text-based interactivity, focuses on how site content is verbally and visually expressed. Study participants viewed one of four versions of either a Democratic or Republican campaign website. Both text-based and campaign-to-user interactivity increased the amount of time users spent on the site and their accurate recall of candidates' issue stances. The co-occurrence of both forms of interactivity, however, showed a noticeably lower level of issue recall, confirming earlier findings that too much interactivity can interfere with user recall of site content.