Media Turing Test

//Comments

Nicholas H

Patrick S

Tyler H

The Media Equation by Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass was an interesting read about people's perception of media as real people and places. Essentially the authors describe different social rules and norms, replace people with the word computer, do some experiments to prove their predictions and report their findings. To sum things up completely, the authors essentially state that, in any given situation between two people or a person and a place, when the other person or place is replaced with some form of media (TV, computer, picture) the person will have the same reaction regardless. 

Though I agree with many of their findings, I felt that their approach to explaining how they went about their experiments was a bit dry and repetative. There were a few experiments that I was amazed at the results by. The one in particular about specialization is the one that I thought was most interesting. The rule is that people will accept certain infomation from a specialist person more readily than the same information from a generalized person. The hypothesis is that information presented by a specialist TV will be accepted and remembered more than the same information from a generalized TV. What they did to prove this was choose a clip of a news program and a clip from a movie to use as the control. For half the participants, both clips were shown on a single TV labled general, and the other half watched the news program on a news TV and the movie clip on the entertainment TV. Shocking enough, the people watching the programs on the specialized TVs though that they were more informative and entertaining.

Overall, though, the book was a different view on how emerging trends in media were starting to embed themselves into the cultural and societal rules.