This paper proposes the concept of enactive system as an alternative to the standard human-computer system and elaborates the idea of content mediation as enactive media. The authors' system consists of the two elements coupled in a holistic manner by means of bodily and spatial involvement, or enactment. Such a system is recursive by nature, involving the impact of the technology on the human agent as well as the effect of the human experience on the technology. Instead of the standard explicit interface, there is an implicit connecting surface, based on unconscious psycho-physiological reactions. The aim is not only to point out an analytic approach to existing media systems but also to develop radically novel media concepts implied by the enactive systems.

It is against the dynamically evolving nature of many contemporary media applications to be analysed in terms of conventional rigid ontologies that rely on expertise-based fixed categories and hierarchical structure. Many of these rely on sharing 'folksonomies', personal descriptions of information and objects for one's own retrieval. Such applications involve many feedback mechanisms via the community, and have been shown to have emergent properties of complex dynamic systems. We propose that such dynamically evolving information domains can be more usefully described by means of a soft ontology, a dynamically flexible and inherently spatial metadata approach for ill-defined domains. Our contribution is (1) the elaboration of the so far intuitive concept of soft ontology in a way that supports conceptualizing dynamically evolving domains. Further, our approach proposes (2) a whole new mode of interaction with information domains by means of recurring exploration of an information domain from multiple perspectives in search of more comprehensive understanding of it, i.e. multi-perspective exploration. We demonstrate this concept with an example of collaborative tagging in an educational context.

We outline general theoretical and practical implications of what we promote as enactive cinema for the neuroscientific study of online socio-emotional interaction. In a real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (rt-fMRI) setting, participants are immersed in cinematic experiences that simulate social situations. While viewing, their physiological reactions—including brain responses—are tracked, representing implicit and unconscious experiences of the on-going social situations. These reactions, in turn, are analyzed in real-time and fed back to modify the cinematic sequences they are viewing while being scanned. Due to the engaging cinematic content, the proposed setting focuses on living-by in terms of shared psycho-physiological epiphenomena of experience rather than active coping in terms of goal-oriented motor actions. It constitutes a means to parametrically modify stimuli that depict social situations and their broader environmental contexts. As an alternative to studying the variation of brain responses as a function of a priori fixed stimuli, this method can be applied to survey the range of stimuli that evoke similar responses across participants at particular brain regions of interest.

This study aimed to examine differences in influence between online news (e.g., New York Times) and social networking sites (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) on attitudes in political campaigns. In a web-based experiment, campaign, polls and election between two fictitious candidates were simulated. Participants’ explicit and implicit attitudes as well as voting behavior were assessed using self-report items and the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The results reveal that information emanating from online news had a significant influence on explicit and implicit attitudes while that of social networking sites did not. Overall, negative items had a stronger impact than positive ones, more so in online news compared to social networking sites. Negative information from either type of media was more likely to change participants’ explicit attitudes in a negative direction and as a consequence also change their vote. Practical implications of the findings and limitations of the study are discussed.

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