The media equation
Thanks to the last discussion about the project with Jon Oberlander, I have found out about this book, which is helpful for the social-psychological aspect of my work: ” The Media Equation – How people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places “ by Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass.
The book starts with three short examples. One of them:
“A research team from an artificial intelligence lab demonstrated a new robot to a group of computer specialists. They described a one-legged hopping machine that had memory, could learn new instructions, was bred for intelligence, could focus attention, could accept punishment and reward, and even had a personality. No one at the meeting noticed that they were using the vocabulary of human psychology to describe the abilities of a collection of wire, silicon, mechanical joints, and computer code.
The language used to describe the robot is also not surprising. The researchers thought they were just using the metaphor of the human mind as a useful tool for analyzing intelligent systems. No one at the meeting seemed to think that the robot was a real person or had human attributes; they just found it convenient to talk about the robot as human.
(..)
These stories show that there are good reasons why some people might confuse media and real life.”
I’m at the beginning of the book and I find it a good reference for better understanding of the media emotional manipulation and ways of stimulating it, which I wish to apply in my artificial rat.