From CASA to TIME: Machine as a source of media effects
Historically, research on social and psychological effects of communication, be it mass communication or interpersonal communication, has focused on messages rather than the medium of communication. The attributed source of these messages has always been one or more human beings, labeled variously as senders or communicators. Around the turn of the century, when much of our communication began to be mediated by computers and related smart technologies, we started orienting to these machines as sources (Sundar & Nass, 2000). We exhibited social responses to them, much like we do with other human beings (Nass & Moon, 2000). As a result, the medium of communication became the source of communication, leading to a groundswell of human–computer interaction (HCI) research on the psychological effects of a wide range of computer-based technologies, such as mobile phones, robots, and conversational agents. As this research matured, attention turned toward specific attributes of these media technologies, and new theoretical frameworks were proposed to guide empirical research on the role of technological affordances in shaping users’ cognitions, emotions, and actions (Sundar & Oh, 2019).
A new subdiscipline called “human machine communication” or HMC (Guzman, 2018) was proposed, with a deliberate focus on the communicative aspects of technological sources, ranging from information transmission to meaning-making. Given the increasing diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) in the past decade, scholars came to view communication technologies as being more autonomous and capable of communicating rather than merely interacting. Emergent AI-based media devices such as smart speakers, with their unique affordances, came to be seen as qualitatively different communicators than simply imitators of human communicators (Guzman & Lewis, 2020). However, their superior ability to personalize communications, often by invading one's privacy, led some to worry that the notion of machines as sources may have gone too far, raising concerns about machine agency undermining human autonomy (Sundar, 2020). The future trajectory of scholarship in this area is one that promises to interrogate this emerging tension between machine agency and human agency, as machines become the default sources of communication.
We begin by reviewing classic studies under the CASA (Computers Are Social Actors) paradigm, which demonstrated that individuals apply social rules of human–human interaction to human–computer interaction. Building on this, we discuss computer-as-source studies following the object-centered view of technology, address their critical limitations, and briefly introduce the variable-centered approach. In the next two sections, we will highlight theoretical models and studies focused on unpacking computer-based media into affordances, such as interactivity, and examine their attitudinal and behavioral effects. This line of research shows that technological affordances serve as the source of media effects via different psychological mechanisms. The chapter will conclude by articulating how the affordances of emergent AI-based media serve to make machines overly agentic, and present our latest theoretical framework on human–AI interaction (HAII-TIME) as emblematic of the future trajectory of inquiry by scholars in this area of research. Taken together, the extension of computer-as-source studies in terms of a focus on communicative affordances and recognition of the autonomous nature of AI-based media lay the theoretical foundation for HMC research on machines as sources of psychological effects.
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Work Title | From CASA to TIME: Machine as a source of media effects |
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License | In Copyright (Rights Reserved) |
Work Type | Part Of Book |
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Publication Date | 2023 |
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Deposited | October 14, 2024 |
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