To a certain extent, this volatility has already become a part of the American political landscape. Increased levels of interactivity in the popular media will only exacerbate this social turbulence. One productive way to approach this phenomenon is by thinking about it in the mathematical terms of Chaos theory. You plug a number into the equation, and you get a clear, unequivocal result. The result emerges in the form of Peter Jennings telling us how to interpret the event that has taken place.
Linearity leads directly to passive reception and the widespread torpor of the simulation model.
The interactive model, on the other hand, looks much more like a non-linear equation, based on iterations or feedback loops. The parallels with interactive media are strong ones. In these interactive experiments, the individual experience of an event is contemporaneous with the event's popular reception. Viewer feedback becomes a part of the event itself. The consequence of this is media coverage that is increasingly non-linear in nature.