Orange Cone

Perceptual Bandwidth

I've been very busy here in Ivrea for the last three weeks and should be transferring more stuff from my paper notebook to this one soon. In the interim, I'm still thinking about animism and expectations. At one of the many dinners full of Interaction Design heavyweights I was talking to Andrew Ortony who pointed me to Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves' book, The Media Equation which seems to be about exactly the stuff I'm thinking about. Haven't bought it yet, but read their interesting article, Perceptual Bandwidth (Google cache), which defines a framework by which we can discuss some of the perceptions created by computer-mediated perception. Yeah, that sounds pretty heady, but there are some nice quotes in the paper:

Human-computer interaction is fundamentally social and perceptual in exactly the same ways all other interactions with people and the physical world are social and perceptual. This means the lessons of psychological research about perception can be applied to media with few considerations for the special status of technology.

New media engage old brains, and to the extent that new interactions mimic real life, then the principles that explain perception in real life can be applied straightforwardly to computers and other media.

In other words, Baudrillard was right, even though it took him a convoluted 170 pages to say it. Damn him.