Only a gullible newbie would be fooled into thinking a computer was an actual intelligence, right? Wrong. During years of research at the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass discovered that even computer scientists and engineers treat their creations as human. And we don't just do this with computers - we anthropomorphize objects such as books and two-dimensional graphics.
This mind-boggling fact has innumerable practical applications. Nass and Reeves's book, The Media Equation, provides insights into crafting convivial computer interfaces that please users and blend into daily life. For interactive media designers, the cogent guidelines contained in each chapter are invaluable.
This book goes far beyond how to build polite gizmos, however. It seems our social instincts lead us to make the same conservative error when faced with media and artifacts: When in doubt, treat it as human. As the authors put it, "Any medium that is close enough will get human treatment even though people know it's foolish and even though they likely will deny it afterward."
The social implications of this fact in a world populated by an ever-growing number of machines are made all the more unnerving by example after example from recent history. We all laughed when a group of Iraqi soldiers surrendered to an unmanned aerial drone during the Gulf War, but it seems that we all surrender in similar, albeit more subtle ways in our day-to-day lives - to our TV sets, our appliances, even print media. If we are so inclined in an age of still-dumb machines, god help us as our artifacts become yet more engaging and autonomous. By making this human tendency explicit, The Media Equation might just help inoculate us against the inclination to credulously anthropomorphize our inventions to come.
The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Televisions, and New Media Like Real People and Places, by Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass: US$27.95. CSLI Publications, Cambridge University Press: +1 (212) 924 3900.
