Book Reading #48: Media Equation

Media Equation Papers



Part 1
Summary
This paper discusses how people tend to apply social rules to computers and have certain expectations of their computers. Three main experiments were performed with different setups. All of these experiments helped to show how people react to computers by applying social interactions between people to how they interact with their computers.

The authors  then explored alternative explanations for their findings. They discuss anthropomorphism, the act of believing something is essentially human. They also discuss how some believe people aren’t reacting to the computer but to the programmer. They then discuss the methods of their experiments.


Part 2
Summary
The second paper further explores the ideas in the first and sites that the reason that people act the way they do with computers has to do with how commonplace and easy it is to generate such responses. The paper describes five experiments. Some items tested are: how a person will be polite to the computer, whether a person will apply the notion of ‘self’ and ‘other’ to the computer, how a person distinguishes between ‘self’ and ‘other,’ whether or not they will apply gender stereotypes to computers and why people act the way they do with computers.
The researchers concluded by saying that the computer-human relationship is a social one.

Part 3
Summary
This paper explores the idea of creating a personality for a computer, the minimum set of cues needed to make the personality and how powerful the effects of the personality are on the user.
The researchers concluded by saying that it is easier than expected to manipulate a personality even in its simplest form and that these findings also imply that humans respond socially to computers.