Why I Like That I Hated The Media Equation

Commented on: George Lucchese, Brian Salato, and Adam Griffin

So, I am torn about this book. On the one hand, the book really made me think... on the other hand, the book really made me think about why I hated the book. At first, the book was intriguing, then it became boring, and once I got to the chapter on negativity, it became exciting in that I couldn't believe the author believed what they were talking about. That chapter is ridiculous. First, the author talks about negativity affecting memory, which he calls proactive enhancement and retroactive interference. These are real terms, which I remembered from taking psyc 107, but luckily, I also remembered that they have NOTHING to do with negativity! They have to do with memory in general. They have to do with previous memories affecting your ability to learn new memories, or vice versa. The author manipulates those terms to "prove" that negativity affects you differently than positivity. This is completely untrue though. His experiments test images like blood and guts verses smily faces. Of course blood and guts are gonna effect your memory more. A smily face is a common occurence everyday, but how often do people see blood and guts? It's not a question of good and bad, its a question of expected and unexpected. Humans have adapted to notice differences rather than constants. We feel acceleration more than velocity, we notice light in a dark room and shadows in bright room. Pain and pleasure represent changes from our normal state. If the author had compared the blood and guts to positive sexual images, then the results wouldn't have been the same. There is also the question of what is negative to some might not be negative to others, and the authors do nothing to account for that. What really bothers me about the book is the very next chapter on Arousal. The authors actually get it right! They acknowledge that the more something arouses, wether positive or negative, the more it will affect memory. This is great... except that the authors still think that negativity is a special case. It's NOT!!!! They act like there are two different factors affecting memory, negativity and arousal. It is only arousal!!! In the book, the authors compare a few things that they decide are positive or negative and calm or arousing. For example, a rocket ship blasting off at night is arousing and positive, while a guy in a rocking chair is calm and negative. Makes sense, right? Well it shouldn't! I think of a rocking chair as a positive because it reminds me of my grandparents house. And why the hell is a rocket ship positive?!?!? And why the hell is it arousing?!?!? Maybe the first rocket launch was positive and arousing, but its become normal for our time. I would classify it under neutral and boring. Now if you were watching it in person, then it would be totally different... but that contridicts everything the book is trying to prove, so that may be why they didn't mention it. There is a lot more I can say about the book, but I need to go to work, so I'll sum it up. I did like the book, not in the sense that it was a good book that made some revolutionary claims that will forever change mankind, but I liked it because it made me think. I disagreed with so many things, that I often stoped reading to think about it for a few minutes. This made reading the book take forever, but at least it was fun to think about how stupid some of the experiments were.