The Media Equation
Politeness is discussed in this chapter of the book. The author is saying that politeness is inherent in our society and it is remarkable how early we are introduced to it as children. Even teachers use politeness as a bench mark of how educated a child was. From the mayor example where he asks "how am I doing?" he is more likely to receive polite responses. On the contrary, if you asked some random citizen, they will have an honest opinion. Humans are even polite to computers and in fact, are probably more truthful towards them.
How can we design computers and media to be polite as humans? We use Grace's Maxims.Conversations should be guided by four basic principles. Quality- Speakers should speak about things that are true. Quantity- each speaker should interact only in the way that the conversation demands. Relevance- speakers should only speak about topics related to the conversation at hand. Clarity- the ideas should come off as unhindered and clear. There are other rules of etiquette that the author speaks about such as it is impolite to reject, its polite to say hello and goodbye, its polite to look at people while they are speaking, and it is polite to respond to people in the method that they contacted you. These are some of the things that we can design media and computers with in the future. We have to keep these in mind if we want to design more friendly interactions on computers.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Extra Credit: Why We Make Mistakes
Why We Make Mistakes
The chapter I read was about multitasking and people becoming so engrossed in the current task that they lose the oversight of other tasks. The author relates it to CFIT (controlled flight into terrain) in that plane pilots focus so hard on one task, they forget to fly the plane and they crash into some terrain. The myth of multitasking comes from computers and their ability to "multitask" between programs. They cannot however multitask, they just switch between processes extremely fast. The human brain works the same way and often when we switch between tasks, we forget what we were going to do when we come back to the original tasks. Our brain has a to-do list sort of like RAM or cache in the computer, except in our case, we can pop an activity from the stack and forget to complete it altogether.
One of the examples the book gives for this was a bus driver who slammed into a bridge. He was talking to his sister on the phone and was not paying attention to his surrounding. He slammed his twelve-foot bus into a ten-foot bridge and it ripped off the top. This is called inattentional blindness. Car manufacturers and the government are at odd with car distractions. The car makers keep wanting to add new features in order to charge the consumer more and make more of a profit. The government wants to reduce deaths by completely blocking some of these features altogether. Multitasking becomes more and more of a problem in today's world and accidents will continue to occur unless new measures are taken to prevent people from interacting concurrently with multiple processes at a time.
The chapter I read was about multitasking and people becoming so engrossed in the current task that they lose the oversight of other tasks. The author relates it to CFIT (controlled flight into terrain) in that plane pilots focus so hard on one task, they forget to fly the plane and they crash into some terrain. The myth of multitasking comes from computers and their ability to "multitask" between programs. They cannot however multitask, they just switch between processes extremely fast. The human brain works the same way and often when we switch between tasks, we forget what we were going to do when we come back to the original tasks. Our brain has a to-do list sort of like RAM or cache in the computer, except in our case, we can pop an activity from the stack and forget to complete it altogether.
One of the examples the book gives for this was a bus driver who slammed into a bridge. He was talking to his sister on the phone and was not paying attention to his surrounding. He slammed his twelve-foot bus into a ten-foot bridge and it ripped off the top. This is called inattentional blindness. Car manufacturers and the government are at odd with car distractions. The car makers keep wanting to add new features in order to charge the consumer more and make more of a profit. The government wants to reduce deaths by completely blocking some of these features altogether. Multitasking becomes more and more of a problem in today's world and accidents will continue to occur unless new measures are taken to prevent people from interacting concurrently with multiple processes at a time.
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