I had the opportunity to listen to Stanford Professor and director of the CHIMe lab, Clifford Nass, yesterday.

Nass was on campus to talk about the relationships, from a psychological perspective, between people and interactive media and new technologies.

Nass gave a really interesting, albeit brief, presentation on his fields of expertise and study and then did about an hour of questions and answers.

Most interesting to me was his research on how distinct voices and faces affect our perceptions and emotions. He really hammered home the fact that people are Wired for Speech (the title of his new book) and that our relationship with various media is predicated on our humanity – our ability to synthesize and produce speech and non-verbal forms of communication.

If you’re at all interested in the human interaction side of technology and media – how people actually use technology and consume/participate in media – I highly reccommend reading some of Nass’ work or listening to an interview with him.