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.

I’ve got just about a month less. I guess not even that. And I just don’t feel like I have it in me. I’m so tapped out it isn’t funny. And I realize the only thing left to do is just get up and keep going. And I will. But it’s just getting tougher and toughter at the moment.

I’m trying not to think about the writing or the move and just concentrate on the reading. But I’ve been finding my page per hour just keep dropping and that’s not good.

Which means the next post will probably not be for weeks. I got quite a bit done today (and last night for that matter). Still there’s so much to do.

I’m still trying to finish two overdue finals from previous quarters. My goal is to have them done by the end of the weekend. After that it’s all thesis all of the time. The next major deadline for that is a workshop which I’ve committed to presenting at on June 3rd (or somewhere in that area).

Plus I’ve got to start packing.

On the job front, I’ve had a couple nibbles so far. Unfortunately one of those was for a firm in Texas. That’s not going to happen.

I’m in a class and I really try not to surf during class. But there is a person who’s ongoing polemic is making us all stupider by the minute. Seriously, the intelligence is being sucked out of the room as she speaks. Getting dumber… me fail english… that unposs-ee-bal.