This book was focused around the subject of using already established psychological knowledge and applying it to media and computers. Reeves and Naas basically took all of the statements and replaced the secondary human in the statement with 'computer', or some form of that. Then they tested to see whether these statements still hold true. The basis of the book was to describe the experiments they did and explain the results.
Personally, I wasn't as fond of this book as I was of 'The Design of Everyday Things'. However, there were a few things I thought of initially as I was reading the first few chapters of the book. They seemed to keep expounding on the fact that people tend to treat computers and media as if they were real people. While I don't agree with them, I do know that I personally have named several pieces of my electronics, but that is mainly to keep them straight in my mind. I don't give them personalities. Sometimes I'll get frustrated at my computer and talk to it like it's got a personality, but I know it doesn't.
One of the other things I thought of while thinking along those lines is the fact that I am a computer science major. I work with computers, and have been dealing more closely with computers than the general populace has. So I was wondering whether this is the main reason I don't really think of media as being real (based on my impression of the definition of real in the book) is because of this. However, I realize that they mentioned that some of the people for one of their studies were fairly knowledgeable about computers, and could have programmed the programs they were using for the study. I just don't think that computers should be praising themselves, or making comments that are human-like, either praising the user or otherwise. If it was a human-like face on the screen doing that, then I can see it happening. But a spell check should NOT be saying things like 'you spelled this hard word correctly. congratulations!'...
Another thought I had concerned their idea of size and clarity of the image or sound. I don't think that people actually think of the media hardware as being 'real', but that they might instead be thinking about themselves being in the same place as what they are watching. This is one of the points I don't think I really understand about it. Also, a computer screen is much closer to you than a TV normally would be. I don't remember if they mentioned taking this into account or not when explaining their different experiments.
Overall, it is a decent book. I think those who are going into a field where they need to be able to interact with people should read this book, but in my experience as a computer scientist, I don't particularly agree with their point of view, nor think that it is a priority to read this book.
Commented on George's blog entry for this book.
I agree that backgrounds in computer science may cause us to not see computers as a real person. About the fact that most of the participants were experienced computer users/scientists, I think the fact this book was written over a decade ago may have something to do with it. I think back then, personal computers were still relatively new, so ideas about the "human" computer may make sense to people back then, but not to us, since we have much more experience with computers now.
ReplyDeleteWhile I too would hate a spell checker that was that verbose a situation in which that would be appropriate just came to my mind. If the spell checker was a part of a Kid Pix equivalent of a word processor the praise might be more productive. The younger audience would benefit from positive feedback much more than adults would.
ReplyDelete