Media = Real Life: Reality Unmasked?

The Media Equation was absolutely fascinating reading with a gold mine of thought-provoking ideas. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this chapter. Because there were so many interesting ideas in this selection, I’ll just comment on them as I encountered them.

On page 5 the Media Equation is introduced. Byron and Nass say, “…we have found that individuals’ interactions with computers, television, and the new media are fundamentally social and natural, just like interactions in real life.” This sentence (and all its variations throughout the selection) is the only one I can’t agree with. I see that the interactions between people and the media are, as demonstrated by the authors, “fundamentally social and natural.” However, I do not believe these interactions are “just like interactions in real life.” This would simply be physically impossible. Computers, television, and other man-made media have only a finite number of possible responses. People do not. Given enough time and information about “initial conditions,” every possible reaction or action of a machine can be predicted. The same, I doubt, can be said about human beings. As far as I know, scientists have yet to understand fully the workings of the human brain—including its interactions with the physical body—so there is no way to predict (or even count) all possible human responses.

That said, the rest of the chapter rang true. Byron and Nass, on page 7, say “[e]ven the simplest of media are close enough to the real people, places, and things they depict to activate rich social and natural responses.” It is interesting that, as I considered what movie to watch for this week’s assignment, I thought of “Short Circuit.” This movie is about a robot named Number Five who, by the end of the movie, has convinced even the most skeptical scientists and engineers (in the movie) as well as the audience that he is, in fact, “alive.” Number Five was not a human-appearing android like Data or a cuddly furball like a Furbie. Number Five was made of steel rods, LED lights, and moved on rubber wheels. But it was his all-too-human responses that caused him to be seen as alive. No one, looking at Number Five, would confuse him with a human. Yet, such is the power of imagination.

Unfortunately, the concept of imagination (what is it? who has or does not have it and why?) was conspicuously lacking from Byron and Nass’s analysis. The selection focused on human-media interaction. On page 8 the authors state:

People have done some amazing things in our labs. They have taken great care not to make a computer feel bad, they’ve felt physically threatened by mere pictures, and they’ve attributed to an animated line drawing a personality as rich as that of their best friend. It eventually occurred to us that people were not doing these things because they were childish, inexperienced, distracted, or because they needed a metaphor. We had to acknowledge that these responses were fundamentally human, and we had to acknowledge that they were important.

I was again reminded of a movie. In “CastAway” a successful, rather arrogant businessman (played by Tom Hanks) finds himself stranded, completely alone, on an island. He finds a basketball in the debris of his plane’s wreckage—a Wilson-brand basketball. Over the subsequent days, weeks, and months, he not only names his basketball (Wilson, of course), but develops a deep relationship with the ball. I am sure virtually every person in this class has a memory of a social relationship s/he had at some time with some object. It might have been a teddy bear, a blankie, a favorite shirt, or anything. Thus, there is more to the story than simply saying that people respond to media. People respond in a social manner to inanimate objects as well.

However, this book was written not just to express the existence of a phenomenon but to look specifically at media, how it functions in our society, and how an understanding of the Media Equation can impact society.

I found the question on page 11: “Why Do People React Socially and Naturally to Media?” the most interesting question. The authors referred to an incident between U.S. senators, the puppet Lamb Chop, and Lamb Chop’s “handler” (Shari Lewis) in an introduction to this section. Their conclusions, therefore, can be applied, I assume, to objects (Lamb Chop is an inanimate object) as well as media.

The authors also suggest that the human brain is designed to react to all perceived objects as real objects and that anything “that seemed to be a real person or place was real” (p. 12). When I was studying anthropology I read about many groups of people (societies) whose names for themselves were, when translated from their own language, the equivalent of “The People.” This is common. However, one group took this concept further. To them, all humans who were not of The People were called Others. They found it simple to identify a person as an Other because Others always walked upside down. They saw people who were not part of their society as upside down! The group had actually trained themselves to perceive some people to be upside down. Amazing what the human brain can do, huh?

In summary… well, I really have no summary. I found the selection to be a lively piece, written in an engaging manner, with thought-provoking ideas. However, I do believe it is important to keep in mind that human-human (or even human-animal) interaction is not the same as human-media interaction.

But at least I no longer feel guilty when I threaten my recalcitrant computer with my fist. It knows when it misbehaves!

References:
Reeves, Byron, and Clifford Nass. 1996. "Ch 1, The Media Equation," pp. 3-18 in The Media Equation. Cambridge University Press.