The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places (CSLI Lecture Notes S)

The media equation, as introduced by Nass and Reeves, is that "media equals real life" and that our interactions with media are "fundamentally social and natural" (p. 5). This book is a popularization of established, replicated research on how people interact with television advertising, tutoring systems, error messages, loud noises, sudden movement, etc. For instance, one widely replicated result is that computer tutoring systems get better evaluations if the evaluation program is run on the same computer. Moving the reviewer to a new computer (with the same program), significantly lowers the score. The social science literature shows that teachers who collect their own evaluations score much more highly than those whose evaluations are collected by others. This is the kind of evidence Nass and Reeves bring to bear in support of the media equation. They don't claim that we are consciously thinking about the computer's feelings and don't want to hurt them. Rather, to the contrary, subjects claim they were doing no such thing. Yet the evidence of our behavior seems incontrovertible.The media equation is a good enough predictor of user behavior, at least for telephone-based spoken dialog systems of the form my company builds, that it has informed our designs from top to bottom. Our applications apologize if they make a mistake. Callers respond well to this. Sure, the callers know they're talking to a machine, but this doesn't stop them from saying "thank you" when it's done or "please" before a query or feeling bad (or angry) if the computer can't understand them. Another strategy recommended by Nass and Reeves that we follow is trying to draw the caller in to work as a team with the computer; again, Nass and Reeves support this with several clever experiments. There is also a useful section on flattery, looking at the result of the computer flattering itself and its users; it turns out that we rate computers that flatter themselves more highly than ones that are neutral.Among other interesting explanations you get in this book are why we're more tolerant of bad pictures than bad sound, why we focus on moving objects, speaking rate equilibrium, what we can do to make someone remember an event in a video, and the role of gender.This book is very quick and easy to read. I read it in two days while on vacation it was so fascinating. In contrast to the classical yet dry social science format of hypothesis, experimental methodology, results, and essentially a summary of the results as a conclusion, Nass and Reeves only vaguely summarize their experimental methodology and take a no-holds-barred approach to drawing conclusions. This may annoy social scientists, most of whom expect their own kind to be far more circumspect.This book is an absolute must-read for anyone designing mediated interfaces. For those who don't believe the results, I'd suggest running some experiments; our company did, and it made us believers.

I come back to the theory at the center of this book, which is well supported by research across multiple media, over and over in much of my thinking and research as a media psychologist. This text is an excellent and essential base from which to start if you are exploring how the media affects our psychology and how psychology should inform media design and consumption patterns.

This was a very good book that I enjoyed and helped me immensely with class. The only reason I did not rate it 5 stars is because it was an old version of the book that looked nothing like the picture shown.

This fatally-flawed book is boundless in it's overgeneralizations and poor research designs. The authors refer constantly to a "growing body of research" on the topic of social interaction with media, when in fact they are only quoting themselves in previous publications.They have presupposed the "equation" they purport to have discovered, and designed their experiments to try and uncover it. This book chronicles the worst example I have ever seen of what happens when you set up a scientific experiment to try and show what you want to find, rather than to collect unbiased data and then scour the results and draw your conclusions after the fact.Reeves and Nass expect to find the Media Equation beneath every stone, and consequently they do. The experiments themselves, to anyone with a background in legitimate science, are a casebook of poor design. They ignore intervening variables, intercoder reliability, and representative sampling. They lean heavily on self-selected and forced participants, subjectively worded and loaded questions, and performing statistical tests on non-numerical data (what is the mean of "rarely" and "often"...? Reeves and Nass will base their results on it).In many cases, they contradict their own results from earlier points in the book, when it suits the experiment at hand. Other times, it seems they will ascribe every reaction to the media equation, regardless of how preposterous it seems. Case in point: People remember a face on a t.v. screen better when it is a close up than when it is a long distance shot. No kidding -- but Reeves and Nass chalk this up to a "social reaction" to the face. I know quite a few information theorists *and regular people on the street* who will tell you they remember a close-up better simply because there is more detail to see. Reeves and Nass don't even recognize the possibility.But worst of all is the grandstanding, overhyped supergeneralization of the results. None of these so-called experiments has any external validity (many are not even internally consistent), yet the authors' claims extend into every field, in every walk of life. The Media Equation, they believe, is the root cause of just about everything.This is Bad Science. At It's Worst.

A previous review called this book "psuedo-scientific drivel."In fact, this book is far from it. Well, as far from it as social science can get. In fact, is the most "scientific" of the user interface books I have read.The main point I took away from the book is that people interact with objects, especially interactive and media devices, as if they were people. They demonstrate that when user interfaces are designed to be polite and interact in a positive social manner, the person has a much more enjoyable and profitable interaction.Other books on the topic of user interface design are far less scientific, relying on generalizations and suppositions rather than constructing a study. Some use data from a usability evaluation, but these are often far from scientific.The authors construct hypotheses, usually based on the results of studies of interaction between humans, and see if the results of the results hold true for human-machine interaction.Usually, it does.