The Media Equation (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996) is a book that details the combined work and research over several years of many people and corporations, most of whom are listed in the text. The two main authors are Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, both then working at Stanford in the Department of Communications.

The preface is mainly a listing of all the people and corporations that aided in the project, intermixed with the background behind what led to the collaboration in the first place. Within the text, we see an example of how two different branches of research can come together in unexpected ways to make a cohesive whole.

Most people would assume that people can tell the difference between real life and media, while some may mistake one for the other when distracted, inexperienced, or too young to know better. Based on their research, people equate media with real life, in a fundamentally social and natural way, and may not even realize that they are doing so. Their research project is called Social Responses to Communication Technologies, and uses such techniques as brainwave monitoring, home video, and questionnaires to measure peoples’ response to media in all its forms. Their research was complicated by the fact that their test subjects did not realize that they were responding in a social and natural way to the media, and so could not give valid answers to the questionnaires. This simple fact held true despite any differences in the test subjects, and variations in the media itself.

Some of the benefits of this research include

Their research points out to media designers that a simple way in which to improve their products would be to make them more natural to use. We can use psychological evaluation tools in order to measure response to the media and so evaluate its affect. By using social science research in order to further media research, new paths can be opened. The most important ‘big issue’ that they mention is the human tendency to confuse what is real with what is perceived to be real, sometimes glaringly different things.

The theory which they propose is that the human brain isn’t evolved enough to handle modern technology. For the course of human existence, only humans could respond both socially and naturally to other humans, so no mechanism for dealing with non-sentient social responses have been developed.

Their research method consisted of ‘borrowing’ research from Social Science, and recreating the experiments using media instead of people.

The research suggests that media are active participants in our social networks, and cross all boundaries. No one exists today who can distinguish between media and real life. It is also suggested that the form of media isn’t an issue; the same social responses can be elicited from multiple and varied forms of media. Their research also seems to confirm that perception is far more important than reality when trying to evaluate the effectiveness of media. The personality of the person must be taken into consideration when establishing the affect of a given media.