The Media Equation

The Media Equation is a book which illustrates that people treat all media, including images, television, and computers, as they would treat real people. Many studies are done on groups which explore specific attributes people apply to media. The authors explore several specific topics within broad categories such as manners, personality, emotion, social roles, and form. Each chapter presents a study done in a particular area of the categories mentioned above. The hypotheses of the authors are all confirmed in each chapter, which goes to show how much people do treat media as fellow humans.

I like this book, in particular because it showed just how deep people's relationship with different media really is. I know that people treat computers like other people, but prior to reading this book I did not know just how deep that relationship goes, or that is applies to many types of media. The structure of the book makes it non-surprising, but when I pull back and think about the things it discusses, I truly am surprised that people behave in such ways. As such, I would recommend this book to others.

This book was pretty easy to read for a few reasons. First of all, the language used is aimed at a general audience. No overly technical terms are used, and any that are used are explained fully. The authors made sure everybody can understand this book. Second, every chapter comes to a positive conclusion. This makes it easy to predict the outcome of the chapter and to review the book, since the reader does not have to check to see if some experiments were failures. Finally, each chapter is organized in the same way. First, the hypothesis is presented with an explanation why the authors thought this. Second, the studies they perform are described in detail, with a few "rules" that basically summarize the hypotheses. Finally, the conclusions are presented with a discussion of why the particular results probably occurred.