This is a light-weight take on psychology (although the references to meatier and more statistically examined papers are there) and in particular the ways we treat computers. Even people who know better - computer programmers for example - treat computers that give them a tiny excuse to do so as if they're a person. A "social actor" as it's coyly phrased. They attribute personality, gender and the like to the computer or the TV, they react to bigger faces as if they're closer and therefore more important and so on.

Particularly interesting are the summaries and implications of the various chapters - although you will notice that some of the chapters contradict themselves: psychologists chop their experiments into little bits and try to isolate certain factors. Sadly people don't work like that, and so there are some contradictions that they highlight and come from that.

There's a couple of bits where I don't trust the conclusions too, but by and large it's compelling and interesting. ( )

http://www.shearonforschools.com/media_equation.htm

I actually heard Dr. Nass present on this book a national meeting of CLE planners. Fascinating. The title really says it all. Drs. Reeves and Nass have done numerous social psychology experiments which were originally done with two persons, and substituted some electronic medium (often a computer), for one of the individuals. For example, in the "flattery effect", experiments have shown that subjects will rate folks providing assistance higher in knowledge, helpfulness, etc. if the assisters praise the subjects, even if the subjects know the praise isn't based on real knowledge and is just being "practiced." Replace the assisters with computers running a program and exactly the same phenomenon occurs. Much of this book tries to point the way to how companies can use this knowledge to better design computer and other technology products. The implications for Computer Assisted Instruction and Distance Learning applications are obvious. ( )