Thank you all for the mental sup­port that you’ve been send­ing my way. I’m half way through the final week of classes. Two and a half more weeks and I’ll be back in Rochester.

I’m feel­ing much better. Dre’s visit was a balm for my soul. We spent a lot of time in nature and talk­ing about the future. And enjoy­ing excel­lent food (if any future MAPers are fol­low­ing the blog, I will be post­ing a list of places to try).

I also think that I’ve made some break­throughs on the thesis. I hope to have a draft (or some­thing) done in the next few days.

I’m begin­ning to rethink every­thing in terms of con­tested spaces. Or rather accept­able behav­ior within spaces. Bots are accepted, or at least tol­er­ated, in envi­ron­ments where they are part of the nat­ural ecosys­tem. Exam­ples include games and AI sites. But once they move into spaces where, as I posted ear­lier tech­nol­ogy is only sup­posed to func­tion as a medi­a­tor, then every­thing gets com­pli­cated. Espe­cially if they don’t iden­tify themselves.

That seems to be what this is all about: what is the accepted level of trans­parency for a given space/interaction.

Ok… I just turned in one of my out­stand­ing finals from last quar­ter and reg­is­tered for summer grad­u­a­tion. So its on. I’m going to do this!

Dre will be vis­it­ing this week­end and I’m really excited. We haven’t seen each other in three months and that’s been really, really tough.

Thesis stuff is moving for­ward. I’ve had a couple good meet­ings with fac­ulty that are help­ing clar­ify a number of impor­tant issues.

There is light at the end of the tunnel. Hope­fully it isn’t a train.

On the plus side I have a thesis advi­sor! Dr. Micheal Sil­ver­stein, sooper genius (seri­ously he was awarded the MacArthur Fel­low­ship Grant, often referred to as the Genius Grant). He was the teacher of the scary Lan­guage in Cul­ture class from first quar­ter, whose midterm ques­tion was immor­tal­ized in this post.

I’m actu­ally rather excited about this. Though I have to admit that I am a little con­cerned that I now can actu­ally sorta speak Sil­ver­s­tin­ian (silverstein-​glossia ?)

A Bot’s role as a par­tic­i­pant throws off the struc­tural assump­tion that technology’s role in the chatroom/IM space is that of a facil­i­ta­tor or medi­a­tor. The great irony is that, as I will demon­strate, the bot is simply another layer of medi­a­tion between two users. Thus it becomes clear that chat­ters often fetishize the bot, imbu­ing it with a level of agency that it never can exert within an inter­ac­tion. What is hidden in all of this is the bot’s cre­ator, with whom the chat­ter is actu­ally in con­ver­sa­tion with, albeit across a tem­po­ral divide. And that’s the next thing that I need to unpack.

Thanks for the encour­ag­ment all. It’s now less than two weeks until the end of classes and about a month before I’m back in Rochester.

The last ten months have flown. Flown I say.

Ten­sion level right now is through the roof. Sleep is some­thing I fondly remem­ber. In part that’s because of stress/panic attacks at night. Dead­lines are really start­ing to loom and there are a lot of uncer­tain aspects for the future.

All that being said, I’m hit­ting harder and on more cylin­ders than ever before in my life. Which only frus­trates the job sit­u­a­tion in a way. I’m doing better work than ever before. Heck I am better than ever before. And yet I don’t know what will happen when I get back to Rah-​cha-​cha. And while I try to push that to the back of my head, you can’t quite get away from it.

Every­one in my life has reminded me that I always land on my feet, and I sorta know that to be true. But at this moment I’m in sorta a free fall and that’s rough because I can’t even tell what ground I’m head­ing for. And it’s tough to get past that, but get past that I will.

Plus, as goofy as it may sound, I’m bummed that I haven’t been able to share a lot of the pic­tures that I’ve been taking. I’ve got lots of sto­ries bot­tled up and really want to share them at some point. Per­haps the summer will be a review of the past year.

Oh… and I will even­tu­ally write every­one back. I swear.

In the mean­time, I’m going to take a nap.

I’ve hit a bit of a the­o­ret­i­cal snag. Basi­cally I’ve real­ized that in the case of bots what we are really look­ing as is still medi­ated com­mu­ni­ca­tion between two people and not medi­ated com­mu­ni­ca­tion between a person and a bot/AI. The latter model priv­i­leges a pro­gram with a level of agency that I don’t think holds up under close analysis.

The bot is noth­ing more than a proxy for it cre­ator. Its every response has been pre­de­ter­mined when the bot is scripted/created. Since it can’t develop or in any unex­pected way alter its responses or behav­ior all it really is doing is func­tion­ing as a com­mu­ni­ca­tion medi­a­tor. While its cre­ator may not be tem­porar­ily present when a bot is inter­act­ing with another person in a chat room, it is the creator’s words that emanate from the bot.

If this is the case, an inter­ac­tion with a bot can be con­sid­ered twice medi­ated person to person inter­ac­tion. The first level of medi­a­tion is that chat/im soft­ware being used to com­mu­ni­cate. The second level is the bot itself, car­ry­ing and pro­ject­ing its creator’s content.

The snag is that while the­o­ret­i­cally you are engaged in an inter­ac­tion with the bots cre­ator via the bot, from a prac­ti­cal stand­point, it doesn’t appear that most people reg­is­ter this. The bot is seen as a sep­a­rate entity from its cre­ator. So I need to resolve how I dis­cuss bot aspects as part of the paper.