Saturday, February 21, 2009

Fear Mongering

The Media Equation article was interesting, although at first I thought they were being fear-mongering conspiracy theorists (for the first half of the article). I assumed they were going to conclude that because humans are "unconscious" of our reaction to mediated life as real life, we will eventually not be able to distinguish mediated reality from real reality (whatever real reality is). But it turns out, they weren't bashing anthropomorphism. In fact, that's not what they were even talking about.

The human tendency shown in various studies to equate mediated life with real life is indeed not surprising. I think we do have social relationships with computers: they respond and send messages, just like humans do. How else would we act toward them except through our learned social norms? Of course people know that computers and television don't depict real life. But those videos and pictures make our brain respond the same way as if they were real.

I have to say I disagree with the author's supposition that this is due to evolutionary factors. If our parents had been born using the kind of technology our generation has, they'd be in the same place as we are, and I think that the human brain will never evolve in order to be able to completely distinguish mediated images and reality from real reality (so long as we interact with other people). We will always have strong social norm patterns that dictate our behavior with our use of media.

The thought that social science and the media equation can help technology developers is something I've never thought about. The examples weren't very specific, but I think this assertion has merit. I also thought the examples of how the media equation can be used were sort of vague. Maybe it's just an interesting observation rather than something that's really going to do that much good. It seems technology developers are already aware of the fact that people may act like they do not distinguish media from reality while they are using it, even though they know they aren't the same thing.

As for the other article, I was completely on the same page as the author. Although I may be more paranoid about the negative effects technology may come to have on society (especially through things like privacy issues), I think that the evolution of technology is natural and that the invention of the computer is comparable to the invention of the spear. It's a very rational, practical, non-alarmist view, which I appreciate. Technology does more good than evil, in my opinion. We do need to monitor it, though.

There is of course a definite overlap between the two articles in the confusion on machine-centeredness and its unfriendliness to human use. If human's apply social norms to their media experience, we do have a lot to learn from this so-called flawed human behavior and intellect. And I certainly don't want humans to be completely "undistractable" either.

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