Rating: 
Summary: Solid Social Science
Review: A previous review called this book "psuedo-scientific drivel." In fact, this book is far from it. Well, as far from it as social science can get. In fact, is the most "scientific" of the user interface books I have read. The main point I took away from the book is that people interact with objects, especially interactive and media devices, as if they were people. They demonstrate that when user interfaces are designed to be polite and interact in a positive social manner, the person has a much more enjoyable and profitable interaction. Other books on the topic of user interface design are far less scientific, relying on generalizations and suppositions rather than constructing a study. Some use data from a usability evaluation, but these are often far from scientific. The authors construct hypotheses, usually based on the results of studies of interaction between humans, and see if the results of the results hold true for human-machine interaction. Usually, it does.
Rating:
Summary: Solid Social Science
Review: A previous review called this book "psuedo-scientific drivel." In fact, this book is far from it. Well, as far from it as social science can get. In fact, is the most "scientific" of the user interface books I have read. The main point I took away from the book is that people interact with objects, especially interactive and media devices, as if they were people. They demonstrate that when user interfaces are designed to be polite and interact in a positive social manner, the person has a much more enjoyable and profitable interaction. Other books on the topic of user interface design are far less scientific, relying on generalizations and suppositions rather than constructing a study. Some use data from a usability evaluation, but these are often far from scientific. The authors construct hypotheses, usually based on the results of studies of interaction between humans, and see if the results of the results hold true for human-machine interaction. Usually, it does.
Rating:
Summary: Solid Social Science
Review: A previous review called this book "psuedo-scientific drivel." In fact, this book is far from it. Well, as far from it as social science can get. In fact, is the most "scientific" of the user interface books I have read. The main point I took away from the book is that people interact with objects, especially interactive and media devices, as if they were people. They demonstrate that when user interfaces are designed to be polite and interact in a positive social manner, the person has a much more enjoyable and profitable interaction. Other books on the topic of user interface design are far less scientific, relying on generalizations and suppositions rather than constructing a study. Some use data from a usability evaluation, but these are often far from scientific. The authors construct hypotheses, usually based on the results of studies of interaction between humans, and see if the results of the results hold true for human-machine interaction. Usually, it does.
Rating:
Summary: Very useful
Review: Anyone who has anything to do with the design of computer software should read this book. It's interesting, easy to read, and WOW will it change the way you design your UI!
Rating:
Summary: Revolutionary! Why media must appeal to the caveman.
Review: Anyone working in "new media" (writers, political consultants, market research, advertising, software designers, tv and movie makers, webmasters, cinematographers, etc.), not aware of how our "old," hunter-gatherer brains interpret the modern world, isn't working with a full tool box.
Authors Reeves and Nass show, through their experiments, that people (including programmers and many others intimately familiar with how media works) cannot disengage hard-wired caveman brains when working with software, playing a game, watching an ad, or seeing a movie. If we could, then why did that horror movie make our hearts race? And why did it make us jumpy afterwards?
So how do we treat computers like people? Here's one example from the book. In human interaction, one is likely to politely agree (a/k/a fib a little) with an acquaintance who says, "Isn't this a great sweater?" One also tends to be more honest discussing the sweater with a third party, "That sweater isn't my favorite color."
If people do treat computers like humans, then (substituting computers for people in the example), a person would agree with Computer A (out of politeness!), but tell Computer B the truth. And that's what happened in the authors' test lab.
People were quizzed by Computer A (programmed to perform poorly), "Aren't I doing a great job?" -- and they gave Computer A high marks. Then, in another room, Computer B asked about Computer A's performance... and people rated Computer A more honestly (and consistantly lower than they rated Computer A "to its face.") The pattern of response to the computers matched the way people interact with each other.
In example after example, covering many, many areas of human behavior (from politeness to flight-or-flight and even to how little it takes for us to perceive something as male or female and how that colors our thoughts), Reeves and Nash show us how our old brains are responding to our high-tech world .
The ideas in this book should provoke discussion, controversy, and more study. But, those in media need to adjust to the reality that if you want to talk to the 21st century human -- you better learn, first, how to appeal to the caveman.
Rating:
Summary: Easy to read
Review: Communicationswith the computer are becoming more and more human-like. Giving a computer a feminine voice affects how we respond to the computer's output to us.
Rating: 
Summary: The whole world is a media equation????
Review: Reeves and Nass find that people use social conventions towards intelligent systems. Without further thinking they decide it is something new, something great. We are thinking of interactive systems as other social beings is their explanation. With some imagination you could come up with a number of other explanations, that equally well fit the data. I do not disagree with their findings, but I really disagree with their conclusions, especially the eagerness and determination with which they jump to them. However I notice their ideas seem pretty convincing, and here lies my real worry with this book. So if you decide to read it anyway keep asking yourself if the conclusions Reeves and Nass jump to are really as worthwhile as they make them appear.
Rating: 
Summary: Breakthrough but a little way shortcut
Review: Reeves and Nass worked out well a previously less studied connection btw. pc's and other audio-visual media vs. humans. Equating the term "social" to computers paves the way to further understanding of ever graphically evolving interfaces. In my opinion, one of their most unexpected investigation was that a perfect audio overrided the effect of an ordinary or even low-quality video... Also the "self/other praising" stuff was intriguing. The unconscious perception of male vs. female voice deserves more worked examples as well as for "source orientation" ,"motion" and "subliminal images". Everything is pretty well organized but through reading, I have been a little disappointed of early short-cutting of almost every chapter and controlled experiments are told with minimal technical detail. Also synthesis based on investigations would have required more insight. I appreciate that this volume aims a broad range of readers with little special background but the text "as is", seems a little way "dryed-out" of taste. Its readers deserve more, I think. Anyway.... great work !
Rating:
Summary: A great interpretation of how people interact with media
Review: The authors explain their hypothesis that people tend to treat computers, television and new media like they would human beings, and that people react to media-based presentations as if they were real-life situations -- even when people consciously realize this is not the case. It's a really interesting premise and the authors do an excellent job explaining their ideas. The only reason I didn't give this work 5 stars is that the authors do not provide enough data on the results of their experiments. They frequently mention "significant" results, but they do not offer the results themselves for the reader to decide just how significant those results may be. This book is clearly written for a large audience, most of whom probably prefer to have the authors offer an interpretation without padding the work with lots of charts and tables. I would have liked a footnote or two with the actual experiment data, but regardless it's an excellent and intriguing read. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in interface design or media studies.
Rating:
Summary: Must read popularization
Review: The media equation, as introduced by Nass and Reeves, is that "media equals real life" and that our interactions with media are "fundamentally social and natural" (p. 5). This book is a popularization of established, replicated research on how people interact with television advertising, tutoring systems, error messages, loud noises, sudden movement, etc. For instance, one widely replicated result is that computer tutoring systems get better evaluations if the evaluation program is run on the same computer. Moving the reviewer to a new computer (with the same program), significantly lowers the score. The social science literature shows that teachers who collect their own evaluations score much more highly than those whose evaluations are collected by others. This is the kind of evidence Nass and Reeves bring to bear in support of the media equation. They don't claim that we are consciously thinking about the computer's feelings and don't want to hurt them. Rather, to the contrary, subjects claim they were doing no such thing. Yet the evidence of our behavior seems incontrovertible. The media equation is a good enough predictor of user behavior, at least for telephone-based spoken dialog systems of the form my company builds, that it has informed our designs from top to bottom. Our applications apologize if they make a mistake. Callers respond well to this. Sure, the callers know they're talking to a machine, but this doesn't stop them from saying "thank you" when it's done or "please" before a query or feeling bad (or angry) if the computer can't understand them. Another strategy recommended by Nass and Reeves that we follow is trying to draw the caller in to work as a team with the computer; again, Nass and Reeves support this with several clever experiments. There is also a useful section on flattery, looking at the result of the computer flattering itself and its users; it turns out that we rate computers that flatter themselves more highly than ones that are neutral. Among other interesting explanations you get in this book are why we're more tolerant of bad pictures than bad sound, why we focus on moving objects, speaking rate equilibrium, what we can do to make someone remember an event in a video, and the role of gender. This book is very quick and easy to read. I read it in two days while on vacation it was so fascinating. In contrast to the classical yet dry social science format of hypothesis, experimental methodology, results, and essentially a summary of the results as a conclusion, Nass and Reeves only vaguely summarize their experimental methodology and take a no-holds-barred approach to drawing conclusions. This may annoy social scientists, most of whom expect their own kind to be far more circumspect. This book is an absolute must-read for anyone designing mediated interfaces. For those who don't believe the results, I'd suggest running some experiments; our company did, and it made us believers.
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