While reading this chapter of Hamlet on the Holodeck, I was
thinking about the way that users interact with their digital environments.
According to the author, one of the essential properties of a digital
environment is that it is spatial, something that actually limits other types of
media. While books can only describe the environment and films can only show,
digital stories allow their users to interact with their environment. In a
digital environment, the user is free to explore their surroundings and is able
to experience distance and the passing of time in a virtual setting. Because
digital environments are spatial, the story is visualized and concrete; the
user is situated right in the setting which creates a sense of immersion. This
is important because the more immersed the user is in a story, the more
emotionally connected he or she will feel.
Emotional connections are also reinforced by another one of
the essential properties of digital environments: they are participatory. Users
are engaged within the stories, able to induce behaviors from other characters
or objects and elicit responses. Psychologically, we are reacting and
interacting with this environment, which leads to questions of whether or not
digital environments are real. The bigger question for me is, how separate are
we from the digital environment? They have the ability to make us feel real
emotions and connections, so they have influence over us, but how much? Can
they make us form certain views or opinions or shape our thoughts and behavior?
The author brought up an interesting point early in the
chapter about how people had fears that they would not be able to tell the
difference between movie images and real life, and how they similarly had fears
that we would soon not be able to tell the difference between talking to a
human or talking to a computer. I remember when AOL instant messaging allowed users
to chat with AIM Bots, such as SmarterChild. It was only an entertainment
feature; the robots would respond based on your own responses and it was always
clear that you were speaking to a robot. Now, I can pull out my phone and ask
Siri to write a text for me or set a reminder. Already, computers are becoming
more intelligent (another essential property of digital environments: encyclopedic)
and more apt to do things; they are becoming more human, or perhaps more real.
I like your points about the participatory elements of digital media, which as I also discussed in my post, are some of the biggest reasons why consumers tend to get wrapped up in the alternate reality of it all. When we interact with certain media, we form emotional connections and can become deceived by the "relationships" we form. The most prominent example of this in the reading for me was "Eliza". With Eliza, users were quite literally interacting with the media as a digital persona. Even though they knew she wasn't real (in most cases), they were communicating with her as if she were. When we interact with media in ways that we also interact with human beings, it can be hard to identify the line between human reality and digital reality.
ReplyDelete