Transaction not interaction

In chapter 2 of Literature as Exploration, Louise Rosenblatt introduces what has come to be called transactional reader-response theory. This post looks at how her concept might influence our view of interaction online.

At the risk of over-simplifying, Rosenblatt maintains that “meaning” is not “in” the text--actually, meaning is not “in” the reader either as some anything-goes reader-response advocates would suggest. Instead, meaning is a complex construction that involves the reader, the text, and the writer. Writers attempt to mediate their experience into text using one or more sign systems--words primarily, but increasingly multimedia in today’s digital world. For readers, the act of reading is also a mediated event in which unpacking the text is influenced by their own prior knowledge and experience as well as their current state in a particular context of time, place and circumstances. The result is what Rosenblatt calls “the poem”--a term that represents the event in which the writer, reader, and text intersect or participate.

One aspect of Rosenblatt’s theory is of particular interest to reading and writing in today’s digital context. She emphasizes that what goes on between the reader, the writer, and the text is not interaction, but transaction. Today’s digital technologies are widely characterized as collaborative, distributed, and interactive. Indeed, one advantage ascribed to digital writing like blogs is how it makes more visible or concrete the interaction between reader and writer. In my own teaching practice, I have emphasized the things that good readers do to interact with text, and through text with the author, as best they can. Visualizing, questioning, making connections, and predicting what may happen are all ways to participate in the text and approach its author--albeit imaginatively. What the comment feature of a blog does is to actualize that connection. Now, I can put my questions, my connections, my predictions into a comment and they can actually reach the blog’s author. In fact, whether or not I send or receive comments, the mere fact that I am aware of the capacity increases my awareness of the other. Because the relationship between writer and reader is operationalized in this way by digital tools, it is particularly important that we understand the difference between interaction and transaction.

Rosenblatt’s position is that interaction “suggests two entities acting on each other, like two billiard balls” (p. xvi), whereas transaction is an “organic process in which the elements are aspects or phases of a total situation” (p. 26). In other words, the result of interaction is more discrete. Each billiard ball is influenced by connecting with the other, but the path each follows after impact is its own. In contrast, a transaction is an agreement, a deal. When two parties come together--a merchant and a buyer, or a reader and a writer--the result is a single entity, even though each participant has its own, different vested interest in that entity. The poem is the deal we make. I would suggest that this concept of participating together in the creation of an event (rather than just bouncing in and out of contact with others) brings me closer to those others and to the interests we share.