Brown’s (1988) study investigated how children distinguish between humans and machines and explored how children make sense of advanced mechanical media in the form of life-like, programmable talking toys. The results showed that children’s perceptions of media toys are influenced both by motion and speech characteristics of the toys. Children tend to develop parasocial relationships with those toys which have human qualities like motion or speech.
Turkle (1984) used an ethnographical approach to study how children believe and feel about computers and their experiences with computers as well. Turkle stated children’s relationships
with computers go through three stages. In the first stage, metaphysical, very young children are concerned with whether the computers think, feel, and are alive. The more contact children have with computational objects, the more they tend to believe those objects are alive. The reasons children think computers are alive involve the ability of computers to provide speech feedback and present emotion. For example, a four-year-old child explained why she thinks the computer is alive because it has a talking voice in it (p. 48). Another eight-year-old stated
“Things that talk are alive” (p. 48). Children also believe computers in possession of emotions and used the showing of emotion as a justification for counting a computer as alive. A seven-year-old child, for example, said “You see; it is happy now. It made a happy sound (p.
50).” In the second stage, mastery, children are all involved with the question of their own competence and effectiveness. They do not want to philosophize, but want to win while working with computers. In the third stage, identity, children are interested in what they can do with computers. By using computers, they can keep a diary, program computers, and do other self reflexive activities. The activities of children working with computers express something of who they are, giving them a chance to understand themselves. In this way, the computer functions as a constructive as well as a projective medium.
Turkle's research revealed that the evolution of children's relationship with computers was a process of natural development and the development could keep pace with children’s recognition growth equally. The younger children could much easier hold opinions that computers were featured with real life than older children. In keeping with the study of children and computers, Turkle (1995) has indicated today’s children know the computer is not alive and the issue of aliveness has moved into the background. The notion of the computer has been expanded to include having a psychology. Children are willing to grant psychological status to computational objects, and endow them with properties, such as having intentions and personalities, previously reversed for living beings. It means that computational objects in the
category “machine”, like objects in the categories “pets” and “people”, can play the role of partners to humans. Children are increasingly likely to project human qualities on computational objects, which are blurring the people/machine distinction. Turkle (1995) concluded two reasons lead children to attribute psychological properties to the computer. First, the computer is responsive; it acts like it had a mind. Second, the machine’s opacity keeps children from explaining its behavior by referring to physical or mechanical properties. Being responsive and opaque, the computer is associated by children with other objects with the same properties: the human mind.
Interestingly, the tendency to connect the computer with human qualities does not fade with age, so that the CASA paradigm suggests that adults socially respond to computers and treat them not simply as tools but as a social actors, too.
2-5 Summary
The computer, being a dominant medium of the age, has not only made an impact on society and culture, but also influenced how people interpret and think about themselves. Moreover, the computer also brings unprecedented experiences to people such as social presence in various new ways. “Presence as Medium as Social Actor” reveals that the interaction between people and computers could be social. The CASA paradigm has empirically proved that people treat computers exhibiting social cues as social actors. Such perception does not derive from a mistaken belief that computers are human, but from a natural human psychological tendency.
Humans mindlessly apply social rules and expectation to computers. These responses are mainly as a result of those individuals’ previous social experiences and the accumulation of learned social behaviors toward computers. The fact that social responses to computers are easy to be induced by minimal social cues provides a means to empower computers to be more friendly, human, and sociable.
Numerous experiments have been conducted with adults and considerable evidence has been delivered. Few experiments have paid the same attention to children or tested whether children similarly respond to computer’s social cues. The research intends to extend the research focus and application of the CASA paradigm to children. When approaching this issue, the possibility that childhood animism may lead children to unconditionally endow computers with mental and human qualities should not be ignored. The features that computers have of responsiveness and opacity lead children to intuitively associate the computer with human brain. Children’s tendency to animate objects may provide powerful evidence to support the idea that children respond socially to computers in similar ways as adults or even to a greater degree. At the same time the tendency may raise the question of whether children are fundamentally social with computers regardless of social cues. Moreover, if children can perceive the sense of social presence via social cues of a computer itself and generate social attraction toward the computer, it may provide a strategy where interaction is specifically designed to engage children within the e-learning environment. This question warrants further exploration in more detail as the authors seek to extend the employment of CASA to children. The research tries to leverage the attributes of interactivity, speech, and the emoticon to empower computers to be more humanized and sociable, which will be discussed in the next chapter.
3 . Interactivity, Speech, and the Emoticon
Literature regarding interactivity, speech, and the facial emoticon and how they function in the social context are reviewed in this chapter.
3-1 Interactivity
When people say that humans are social beings, they are speaking of the human tendency to conduct social activities and associate with others. Human communication is a universal and essential feature of an individual’s social life. The processes and outcomes of human communication vary systematically with the degrees of interactivity afforded or experienced.
Interactivity is not about nonverbal and verbal codes per se; rather, it offers potentially valuable insights into the interrelationship of humans and computers (Burgoon et al, 2002). Rafaeli (1988) argued that interactivity is one of the properties of the communication process, and he maintained that interactivity is variable given the way preceding messages are related to even earlier ones.
That argument means that interactivity is a condition of communication in which participants are mutually engaging and taking turns as sender and receiver (Hanssen, Jankowski, & Etienne, 1996;
Rogers, 1995). Interactivity can be viewed as a mutual process where message exchange and role exchange are two essential elements for maintaining the process and taking it forward. These two features derived from interpersonal communication can be developed into a set of social cues to evoke a sense of social presence.
Marakas et al (2000) suggested that the social character of computer technology serves as an important element enabling people to view the computer as a social actor. In regard to the social character of technology, Marakas et al noted that promoting the sense of interactivity is one way to encourage the desire to incorporate social characteristics into the computer, and that perceptions
of control have been proposed as a main category of social characteristics, which occur when the user’s interaction with the computer is such that the individual is being directed in a proactive manner by the technology. Interactivity here is referred to as a means of developing sociable technology, and it involves a perception of control. Relevant educational literature shows that perceptions of control are critical to a computer-mediated learning environment. Popular arguments state that placing the learner in control can increase motivation (Schnackenberg &
Sullivan, 2000; Yeh & Lehman, 2001), while some researches indicate that user control offers no benefits over program control (McNeil & Nelson, 1991). According to the aforementioned reviews, learner-control interactivity indicates that instructional media interact with an individual in a passive manner in which the individual primarily plays the role of sender with the computer as receiver.
Passive interactivity may lower the quality of the communication experience, leading the computer to act more like a tool and fail to satisfy the learner’s desire for a social relationship during the interaction. These studies suggest that instructional media that interact with the learner in an active manner enable learners to feel a stronger sense of social presence from a computer. Such awareness allows children to treat the computer as a companion, and as such the learning experience can be enhanced by their intrinsic motivation. Therefore, it is argued that both learner-control and learner-controlled communication in an e-learning environment can persuade children to treat a computer as a social actor.
3-2 Speech
Language is a fundamental medium for interpersonal communication. People convey their ideas, emotions, and desires by means of language. Language can be regarded as a social product of the faculty of speech, that is to say it is a human communication system based on speech sound (De Saussure, 1959; Pearson, 1997). In general, language competence is an inherent human ability and speech performance is the externalization of communication. Indeed, humans have developed language skills out of the need to communicate. As long as social groups continue to
be an integral part of human life, human sensitivity to voice and language cues has a critical role to play in the interactions among people. That is, voice plays a dominant role in interpersonal communication. As said by Nass and Brave (2005) “that humans have become voice-activated, with brains built to rapidly equate voices and people and quickly act on the identification” (p. 3).
Speech is more than merely the speaker sending messages to the listener. In the case of a computer user, speech conveys a social presence resembling human-to-human relationship.
Jensen et al. (2000) also concluded that the voice has special properties that evoke a sense of social presence and proclivity to collaborate.
Chalfonte et al (1991) has empirically demonstrated that speech is a more expressive medium compared to text because the features of the voice as a means of expression allow communicators to devote more attention to the content and keep their audience’s attention during its creation. Moreover, speech modality appears to support or encourages the social process of collaboration to form social bonds. It has also been found in other studies that speech in computer-mediated communication has the unique feature to create social presence (Keil &
Johnson, 2002).
Humans are good at extracting the social aspects of speech as a result of human evolution.
Numerous studies related to the CASA paradigm suggest that the human-computer relationship could be leveraged by activating the social aspects of speech (Nass, & Brave, 2005). The social attributes of speech could induce people to associate computers with humans, which is of benefit in increasing the identification and preference toward computers. Through an interactive way of guidance and feedback of speech, the perceptions of human to human communication could be reached.
Inspired by the CASA paradigm, Strommen and Alexander(1998) created two character-based interactive learning toys with audio interface. The toys with audio interface could ask questions, offer opinions, share jokes, and give compliments. They observed that children smiled and nodded
in response to the character’s praise, and several even responded verbally. For example, Children said “I know” as they heard “You’re good at this” from the character. Speech not only can draw children’s attention to its content, but can also induce social responses. Brown’s (1988) study showed that speech, being more of a human quality, appears to exert a stronger influence on children to create a parasocial interaction with talking toys. The phenomenon that talking toys elicit social responses from children can be seen in Turkle’s (1984) study on how children interact with the computer toy, Speak and Spell. It was found that children are sure that Speak and Spell is alive because it talks. Turkle stated that talking is a part of a large set of attributes used to construct the notion of alive/dead when the child confronts a computer toy. Children try to make sense of the computational objects with lifelike properties by way of developing psychological reasoning.
Thus, the study believes that using speech in computers can not only enable audio output interface or complement visual interface, but can provide an individual with a sense of social presence via its social attributes. Hence, speech applied in an e-learning environment can allow a child to feel like he or she is learning with a social partner, enhancing the child’s social or intellectual attraction toward the computer and improving intrinsic motivation.