Media Equation Essay -- essays research papers fc

The media equation is a guess developed by two professors of communication, Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, at Stanford University. The theory is simple. They state that masses treat the media as if they were real, hence the equation media = real life. Basic totallyy Reeves and Nass ar saying that people on an unconscious level perceive the media as real. People view objects of the media are talking to them psycheally. Reeves and Nass view things such as computers, video recordings, radios, and other medias as inanimate objects. They dont intend that these objects are about to get up and move as if they were alive, hardly that the objects that relay the media are reacted to as though they were alive. Reeves and Nass credit the slow railway yard of evolution as the reason that the merciful race responds socially and of course to the media The adult male brain evolved in a world in which only when humans exhibited rich social behaviors, and a world in which all perceived o bjects were real physical objects. Anything that seemed to be a real person or place was real. So we havent yet adapt to the twentieth century media that only depict images, but which themselves personify the characteristics of human actors. (Griffin, pages 375-376)To prove their theory Reeves and Nass held experiments. One is an experiment that they did with television. They gathered a assort of students to participate. The goal of the study was to show that responses to television content could be changed when the television sets were assigned particular roles. (Reeves and Nass, page 122). They took two stems of students and gave them specific tasks. The first chemical group was to watch two separate televisions, called specialist TVs. One TV was determine as News and the other one was identified as frolic. For each TV the participants wee in different chairs. The other group was to watch one TV with both countersign and entertainment, called generalist TVs. The TV was labe led News and Entertainment. The students who watched the specialist TV said the news was more important and the entertainment was more interesting than the ones who watched the generalists TVs. Consistent with the speculation that specialist TVs provide more representative content than do generalist TVs. (Reeves and Nass, page 135)The other exper... ...fore, with all the qualifications met for a good theory I would say it is safe to say that this is a very good theory. Bibliography1.Geiger, exercise set Reeves, Byron. The personal effects of Scene Changes and Semantic Relatedness. conference Research Vol. 20 April 1993 pages 155-171.2.Griffin, Em. Communication, A First Look At Communication Theory. San Diego McGraw-Hill, 2000.3.Leshner, Glenn Reeves, Byron et al. Switching Channels The Effects of Television Channels on the Mental Representation of Television. Journal of transmit & Electronic Media Vol. 42 Winter 1998 pages 21-33.4.Moon, Youngme Nass, Clifford. How Real Are Com puter Personalities? Communication Research Vol. 23 December 1996 pages 651-670.5.Nass, Clifford Reeves, Byron Leshner, Glen. Technology and Roles A Tale of deuce TVs. Journal of Communication Vol. 24 pages 122-136.6.Nass, Clifford Sundar, Shyam S. Is Human-Computer Interaction Social or Parasocial? Human Communication Research August 17, 1994 114-126.