Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
find the familiar, may very well make us feel more at home, but it can also cover over
important information about what we are doing in the course of mediation and how we
been audio only. Does this make for better communication? Not necessarily; more in-
formation is not always better. Does it make for rich new combinations of information?
Yes.
Media use, as media theorists from Norbert Wiener to Marshall McLuhan have ar-
gued, changes the user. With each shift and often each increase in automation, simula-
tion, and transmission, we discover not only new technologies but new ways by which
we extend our presence. I have suggested that the direction in media design over the
past three decades to create increased visualization brings up new questions about how
we engage media and, specifically, networked forms. If we have an anthropomorphic
urge to humanize our things with faces, what are the consequences of a pervasive me-
dia engagement where we stay present to each other via real-time and often visual sim-
ulation? As we change modalities of mediation, in what ways do we also change our
“human” perspective?
The Media Equation: The Computational Persona
X-reality, a continuum of experience across real and simulated sites, is not necessarily
a new phenomenon if we look at issues of perception. When it comes to media use,
Stanford professors Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass say that we have always blended
the virtual and the real. In our minds we blend signals from the living and the animated.
We grant animated forms—things that give the appearance of being alive or human-
like—agency. In effect, we cannot distinguish between real and simulated signals.
In the 1980s, inspired by the fast-emerging world of personal computers and the net-
works that linked them, and after nearly forty years in communication research, Reeves
framed the question: How do people react to a mediated image? To answer this ques-
tion, Reeves and colleague Nass, a research scientist focusing on communication and
computers, designed a series of laboratory experiments to assess how subjects respon-
ded to traditional forms of media—like television—as well as the new media simula-
tions of computers. In what became the groundbreaking findings, they discovered that
people cannot perceive a difference between a mediated image and a real person or ob-
ject before them.
