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Article: The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places.
- Article from:
- Technical Communication
- Article date:
- November 1, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Society for Technical Communication. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Do people relate to media in the same way they relate to each other? Most of us, unless we have read Byron Reeves' and Clifford Nass' The media equation, will answer negatively. However, the results of the psychological studies done by Reeves and Nass show that this negative response is not correct. Their work proves, as the back cover claims, that interactions "with computers, television, and new communication technologies are identical to real social relationships and to the navigation of real physical spaces." The authors have borrowed theories and experiments about human-human interaction and used them to prove that "media experiences equal human experiences" (p. 251).