Putting a Face on Things - Putting a Face on Things - page 14

to the media equation. “Give anything eyes and a mouth, it would seem,” they write,
“and personality responses follow.” 20 We can describe personality as a profoundly hu-
man attribute, one that speaks to key characteristics of humanness. And yet, we grant
personality to things that occupy the realm of the nonhuman—the mechanical, the com-
putational, and the synthetic. The media equation implies that we not only respond in a
social manner to media technologies themselves, such as computers, but we also treat
images that appear on a screen as real. In addition to these two categories, I would offer
a third category of engagement that relates to pervasive media: we now create condi-
tions in which machines augment our personality and presence.
In terms of human-machine interactions, as viewers, we fill in the blanks that turn an
abstract pattern into a face or a line of text into a personality. In the 1995 paper “Can
Computer Personalities Be Human Personalities?” Reeves and Nass, with additional
researchers, find that it takes only the most “superficial manipulations” of a computer
program to imbue it with a personality that affects the user's experience. 21 It affects us
in the sense that we ascribe intention, tone, and agency to the machine. One does not
need extensive graphics or natural language to create a machine with a persona.
In the experiment outlined in their article, the researchers find that even the most re-
medial text interaction can convey basic human expression like dominance or submis-
sion. 22 If the machine says, “Do this now!” or “Please follow this procedure,” we have
a very different experience of the persona of the computer, even if we understand on a
logical level there is no intention behind the tone, only programming. The importance
of their findings for an analysis of pervasive media is that we interpolate machines into
our world as social actors.
The anthropomorphic urge is not a new one. Computer science and science fiction
share a long history of machines that seem human or endowed with human persona. 23
But the shift in scale and speed of engagement with pervasive media relates to our sense
of onging and intimate proximity with media objects. Both the size of media technolo-
gies, in the arrival of the handheld device, and their nearly constant physical proximity
add to our social relation with technology. Our faculty of perception is not always reas-
onable, which makes our interaction with an increasingly animated world progressively
anthropomorphic.