Media Equation: Microblogs

Part 1 - Machines and Mindlessness

Summary

This paper examines the general social reactions that people have towards computers during an interaction. Social responses such as politeness are apparent in interactions. The paper explains that this is not caused by human ignorance or inability to recognize the computer as non-human, but rather simple cues which subconsciously create social reactions in the brain. Attributes such as politeness, reciprocity, self-disclosure, and gender are illustrated in the examined studies. Attention is given to clarifying that this is not because of factors like anthropomorphism.

Discussion

The concepts discussed in this paper are easily observable in everyday life. This study really proves the idea of the social treatment of computers by illustrating it in so many different ways. Direct parallels to psychology of human to human interactions can be seen in the experiments. I appreciate the thorough nature of the studies run.

Part 2 - Computers Are Social Actors

Summary

This paper focuses on disproving ideas that the social interactions between machines and humans are the result of some sort of dysfunction or ignorance of the user. The experiments focused on aspects like politeness, gender, and the computer opposed to the programmer of the computer. The studies continued to find that social attributes are given to machines by humans and are not the result of any kind of dysfunction or ignorance.

Discussion

This paper was nice in that it gives detailed accounts of the trials used to establish the truth of these rules. The experiments are cleverly designed and very interesting from a Computer Science standpoint. They give clues as to how we can create programs which elicit social responses from users, without the need for extremely complex software.

Part 3 - Can Computer Personalities Be Human Personalities?

Summary

This work focuses on the identification of the minimal set of attributes required to create a personality within a machine. Attention is given to the ideas of dominance and submission traits within personality by assigning them to computers within experiments. Results continued to indicate that human-human psychological theory holds true for human-machine interactions (where the machine has a set of social attributes).

Discussion

This paper was mostly a repeat of what we've seen illustrated in previous papers. However special emphasis was given to the main hypothesis with many details given. The conclusions, though not surprising (based on the other papers), are important for the field of Computer Science and software/hardware design.