Media Life is a course intended for undergraduate students across campus. Its goal is to make people aware of the role that media play in their everyday life. The key to understanding a "media life" is to see our lives not as lived WITH media (which would lead to a focus on media effects and media-centric theories of society), but rather IN media (where the distinction between what we do with and without media dissolves).
The Media Equation: Media = Real Life People interface with media; i.e., they respond to media using the same rules that govern face-to-face interpersonal interactions with other people
The Media Equation is a general communication theory that claims that people tend to treat computers and other media as if they were either real people or real places. The effects of this phenomenon on people experiencing these media are often profound, leading them behave and respond to these experiences in unexpected ways, most of which they are completely unaware.[1] Originally based on the research of Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves at Stanford University, the theory explains that people tend to respond to media as they would either to another person (by being polite, cooperative, attributing personality characteristics such as aggressiveness, humor, expertise, and even gender) – or to places and phenomena in the physical world – depending on the cues they receive from the media. Numerous studies that have evolved from the research in psychology, social science and other fields indicate that this type of reaction is automatic, unavoidable, and happens more often than people realize. Reeves and Nass (1996) argue that, “Individuals’ interactions with computers, television, and new media are fundamentally social and natural, just like interactions in real life,” (p. 5).
Valis: 0:21 Morel: 17:24
VALIS: the world as we experience it is not the real world - our universe is a hologram (and in the end the book remains unresolved) for Dick, the world today is a panopticon (Black Iron Prison) MOREL: the world as the people experience it is real and not real – they are projections (holograms)
italian movie version 1974 leading to Last Year At Marienbad (L'Année dernière à Marienbad) in 1961