Extra Credit1: Media Equation

This chapter focuses on politeness. It is intersting to think about where all of our social norms have come from. Most everyone understands the subtlties of interacting with other people. In a summaraztion, being polite is trying to make everyone feel happy and comfortable and the way that you can make people feel that way is to think about how you would feel and what you would want others to do for you. This chapter is interesting in that it continues to bring this idea of being polite into the rules for computers. Are the rules social ettiquet the same for computers as it is for humans? This is where some awesome experiments can come in. Two rules have emerged from this.
Rule 1: When a computer asks a user about itself, the user will give more positive responses whan when a different computer asks the same questions.
Rule 2: Because people are less honest when a computer asks about itself, the answers will be more homogeneious than when a different coputer asks the same quesions.
Even though these are interesting findinge, I feel like I have read them before or it is just common sennse. In any case, we can use this information to effect media. Most people deny that they are polite to media, but that doesn't make it any less the case. Their responses were automatic. This proves that computers are social actors. It is important to then create media to be polite, but it is even more important to make sure that the media is not impolite. Designers can ensure this by borrowing results of social scientists who study politness. One great scientists that can be looked towards is H. Paul Grice. He narrowed down the rules for polite interaction by four categories: quality, quanitity, relevance, and clarity. This means that speakers should only talk about what is important on a level that is equal to the listener and that they should give a resonable amount of information - not too much or too little. Some other important facts to know is that it is impolite to reject something, it is polite to say hello and goodbye, it is polite to make eye contact, and it is polite to match the method of communication. The interesting part of politness is when you start interacting across different cultures and demographics. This is the case because in one cluture a gesture may be polite and in another the same gesture is impolite. So, the developer needs to make sure they know their audience. This chapter was really interesing. Most of the material I think I already understood, but it was cool to see how they put it into words and applied it to computers.