William Gibson, and the lack of verbs in multimedia production

I am currently making my way through the essays in Distrust That Particular Flavour, the first anthology of William Gibson's non-fiction. The opening piece is the classic 1989 Rolling Stone essay "Rocket Radio". It's rightly famed for the observation that "The Street finds its own uses for things", but I was struck, on re-reading it, by this passage:

A BBC executive working on another vision of "interactive television" offered me a tour of a small research facility in San Francisco. He was interested in having me "do" something with this new technology: The lab we visited was devoted to…. well, there weren't verbs. I looked at things, watched consoles as they were poked and prodded, and nobody there, it seemed, could even begin to explain what it was I might be doing if I were to, uh, do one of these projects, whatever it was. It wasn't writing, and it wasn't directing. It was definitely something, though, and they were certainly keen to do it, but they needed those verbs.

It's over twenty years since Gibson wrote that, and for sure, some kind of consensus around interactive media has surely emerged in the intervening time, but in truth, how much? I'm minded of our Group Think session last year on multiplatform production, and the general feeling around the table that no-one, from commissioners through to producers, really knew what this stuff was all about, that everyone was still making it up as they went along: " …there were no verbs". Indeed, and we couldn't even come to much of an agreement about the nouns.