People Treat Computers as People

   I wrote this in 1996, part of Electric Minds, a publication/community that combined social media and user generated content ten years too early. I called it "the social web" -- the term "social media" was still a decade in the future.

People Think of Computers as People
Howard Rheingold

Two social scientists at Stanford University have performed  extensive research that led them to a startling conclusion: Popular wisdom  to the contrary, people treat human representations on television and  computer screens in exactly the same way they treat other people. The  implications of this research have very practical consequences in what they  tell us about how to design computers, and how to anticipate the social  consequences of communication media. At the same time, the philosophical  and moral implications are profound: at a visceral level, humans literally  do not know the difference between real people and simulations, yet we live  in a world in which more and more of our social interactions are mediated  by computer programs or video images.