The article "The Media Equation" written by Bryon Reeves and Clifford Nass, features the topics of of new mediums, computers, and how humans interact with them. The theme of this book is how people treat their devices like real people and things. This article starts out discussing how average citizens today can confuse life portrayed by the media with real life. Because of this exponential increase of exposure to technology it is easy to blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Because of the multitudes of things you can do on a computer, computers create social presence. Even though they are not real and do not have feelings, we as humans treat them as if they do. On a computer you can connect inter personally with friends or you can connect to mass media. You can communicate inter personally via instant messenger, voice, and video chat. When talking to a friend on video chat, your computer creates a social presence for who you are talking too. Even though it is a mediated social exchange, it's an exchange nonetheless.
The article points out an interesting finding about human social behavior. That behavior is that humans are adept to social adaptation. Older discoveries of interpersonal transactions indicate that face to face interaction is much more fufilling because you can see that persons nonverbal cues. However, due to the human ability to socially adapt, many internet users have met other users and have become friends. Especially in the online gaming genre. Massive Multiplayer Online games have become a utopia for meeting new people and creating an environment conclusive for social interaction. As a result, computers facilitate these happenings and acquire a social presence of their own. When humans treat inanimate objects as humans it's known as Anthropomorphism.
I have personally experienced this phenomenon and I would venture to assume that in current society so has everyone else. My laptop computer recently had a hard lesson in physics when my five year old sister knocked poor macbook off my kitchen table onto the ever so gentle granite tile floor. Needless to say i felt as if I had actually lost one of my friends. However, I've recently purchased a 27'' imac and have been experiencing anthropomorphism like never before! I always make sure to compliment my computer when it demonstrates it's new graphics card. I'm sure to brag to my friend when my computer and I download something three times as fast and i mock him as he curses his PC. and I even bought her some screen cleaner so she'll stay clean and in turn reward me with good performance. I treat my computer with respect and sometimes make decisions concerning the well being of the computer.
As written in the article, the amount of time we spend on computers tends to blur the lines of whats real and whats simply a pixel. As a result human interaction with their computers is a key outlet into another discovery of human communication. We can use computers to see how humans treat them which leads to an honest understanding of their communication with the computer. In otherwords, people will be polite to other individuals sometimes and as a result their responses are not always true. When interacting with a computer, there is no face to face human communication which lends to a more honest answer.
All in all, by studying computer mediated communication we are brought a different perspective on studying human communication. By using computers to communicate in some contexts we can choose who we want to be, where we want to be, and be able to define ourselves to other users as we want to be.
