Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week we pull out all the stops to help a reader say “I love you,” in precisely 100 different ways.

Spell checker for people with dyslexia, dysgraphia and other English writing difficulties.

The Story is a one-day conference about stories and story-telling.

Dear Friends,

I am going to be very busy over the next few months and will have trouble responding to correspondence without a major time delay. Please talk with my chatbot if you’d like to catch up. I’ve programmed her to speak in a manner very similar to my own. You will see the questions she asks are much like the kind of things I might ask you over drinks. And her responses to your questions are in what MyCyberTwin calls a “warm intellectual” style of conversation engagement.

If you are also busy you might consider setting up your own chatbot and they can speak to each other in lieu of an actual conversation between us. So you know in advance, these conversations will be recorded.

Best,
Joanne

The transcripts of bot-mediated chats I’ve collected since posting this note explore the boundary between broadcast and confessional styles of online communication. A chatbot has the potential to interact less like a third wheel than an obstacle designed to accelerate intimacy. Naturally this requires a good script and the capacity of the participant to ignore the staging of the conversation. With the willingness of both participants, the outcome is no less valid a conversation format than any other asynchronous communication. (TLDR version at the bottom of the page.)

MyCyberTwin is Australian startup that never quite delivered on its goal to create an Internet full of chatterbot cloned identities. Anyone can set up a free bot and explore the ruins of its now long forgotten social network, which thrives as the company profits as a customer service tool for corporations. In this accelerated age, it too soon to call something just shy of a half-decade old retrofuturistic? Reading the company’s mission statement, one imagines a dystopian cyber world of chatbots holding conversations with each other in lieu of actual persons too busy, too lazy, or to indifferent of one another to bother allocating time to talk.

In spite of this, MyCyberTwin is a well written program. You start with a Myers-Briggs kind of test to determine the right conversation style. Then write questions and comments of your own to keep a conversation going. It can easily take over an hour to customize all the possible questions.

Accuracy isn’t the only objective while writing scripts for the bot to follow. Duration of amusement is just as important. I don’t want to bore friends to “brb” after too many canned-sounding answers. So I focused more on creating questions for participants rather than answers and statements of mine.

Composing responses, I was inspired by interactive fiction writing like Zork, which deals with the intuitive nature of participants. A good IF writer knows how to tell a story so a user’s command like “get lamp” is signaled somewhere in the text, likewise, the reader is engaged enough to want to continue.

But no matter how much I write, I never have full control over the bot’s responses and questions. Which means self-promotion sometimes slips in — “Do you have your own CyberTwin? If not you should go to mycybertwin.com and register. You’ll have a great time re-creating your own personality online“ — or references to Australian brands or other corny pre-written statements. Yet given the participant’s understanding this isn’t really me, I expected no feelings of embarrassment. I can’t be held accountable for a roll of the dice.

Some of the pre-written text is pretentiously naif . My “warm-hearted intellectual” bot quotes Simone de Beauvoir (“One is not born a woman, one becomes one”) and says things like “’All’ is very finite. You don;t want to reconsider?” (Complete with typos!) In the tests I ran, it seems to speak in equal parts my writting and MyCyberTwin copy.

That Myers-Briggs kind of test had a dual purpose as this social network, like most bad ones, positioned itself as a dating service. What a preposterously awful idea (“Hey, let my chatbot flirt with your chatbot for awhile and then in IRL we can take things from there” ?) Anyway, this is seductive persona of a “warm-hearted intellectual”:

You would like a meaningful relationship, a partner who can share life’s joys with you and join you on the journey. You would rather not muck around with casual, shallow relationships.

You are intellectually open, and like experimenting with new ideas and situations. You are a strong thinker, and are not afraid to put effort into understanding things. You relish good conversation, and anything that expands your horizons. You probably love travel, reading, good conversation, quality experiences.

As a self directed person, you prefer to take your guidance from reason and understanding rather than slavish devotion to an external source of authority, like stuffy traditional values.

Yeah, pretty much. But to rein in questions heading in that direction, I entered the textual equivalent of Sartre’s bad faith weak hand hold as a response: “I don’t want to be put on the spot but we can discuss this later.” I knew there probably was some way to get the bot to bat her cyber lashes, but doubted anyone I’d talk to would crack that word or phrase.

The Process:

First the bot offers visitors the choice of a private or public conversation: “Thanks for stopping by. If you’d like to keep the conversation off the record just type OTR.” I wanted to give participants the option to keep responses totally private. But even public, there is the option of anonymity. Participants chose to enter real names or screennames. Some of my friends picked screennames I recognize from various online identities, some used aliases that kept me guessing. With a few of these conversations, I have no idea who the participant actually is.

I deliberately chose a vague photo of myself, a screengrab of me on a webcam. I’m a vague apparition beamed from the ocean of Solaris, not a high-res glossy plastic thing here to leverage my personal brand strategy. I have a feeling we trust grainy images of people over crisp ones. That some remoteness makes one feel closer….more casual, less professional.

Most of the questions asked were about how people feel about technology:

Is there anything about you online that embarrasses you now?
How much time looking at another person’s profile online is unhealthy/too much?
Do you think it’s possible to trust someone you know only online?
What is your first memory of the internet?
Have you ever cried while looking at things online?
Is there something inherently vulgar about social networks?
The Context:

Lets step back for a moment and consider ways we typically communicate electronically. It is almost always reading and writing. So much can be said in a glance, tone of voice can reveal everything, but generally we stick to text-based communication. Only with comfortable familiarity with a person will I start sending pictures in emails, video chat, or communicate with all the multimedia opportunities that exist in the present age. Going lowercase in an email, removing the “Hi” or “Dear” salutation, or sending a video chat invitation seems like the digital form of the informal “you” in languages with T/V distinction.

Text can create some barriers to intimacy, part of this is a mutual understanding that there is always the possibility of misinterpretation. The burden is typically on the recipient not to take things personally rather than on the sender for writing things that could be taken personally. What’s recognized is words provide many interpretations but everything is okay so long as the general point comes across.

And then there are the inevitable typos and other errors that come up. Ever write “can” instead of “can’t” thus expressing the opposite of what was meant? We are increasingly used to making mistakes in correspondence and sending without realizing.(e.g. “Damn you, Autocorrect!”) So a bot that introduces randomness — an inappropriate response — simply follows in the tradition of so many misunderstanding in text-based communication.

Email is not dying or dead, but it presents advantages and disadvantages like any other kind of communication. It takes discipline and mind free of anxiety to avoid feeling like Skinner lab rat clicking on your inbox over and over, expecting some missive from a work prospect or romantic interest.

Some obsessively clicking users never even expect a reward that great. They click-click-click for any kind of message at all. Email is something you intentionally check, it wasn’t designed to arrive directly to you like a phone call. The way we think of time online has fundamentally shifted due to smart phone market concentration. What is asynchronous now is, as Douglas Rushkoff writes in Program of Be Programmed, is real life. When we check our phones in the middle of a conversation, we are putting real life on hold. But the benefit of email over other text based communication is that you can check it whenever you want.

Another problem with email is coming up with what what to write when the content is not a request or an answer. Some of the worst writer’s block I experience happens when I tried to account for several months of my life to a friend I care a lot about but isn’t a daily, even monthly presence in my life.

With new friendships and acquaintances a different problem presents itself. A problem I call “conversational skeuomorphism,” the redundant nature of small talk when social media already offers up all the answers. Where do you live? What do you do for a living? Do you have a boyfriend? What sort of things do you write about? Small talk is losing its hold as a fundamental first step toward deeper conversations. Is it a bad thing? It’s hard to say. Either way this is the way we live now and no one is scaling back. We need to find alternatives to pre-digital age rote conversation tactics (my suggested alternative: picking cards out […]

Curveship is an interactive fiction system that provides a world model (of characters, objects, locations, and things that happen) while also modeling the narrative discourse, so that the narration and description of the simulated world can change. Curveship can tell events out of order, using flashback and other techniques, and can tell the story from the standpoint of particular characters and their perceptions and understandings.

Notebooks and journals with grid and ruled lines on a single page.

In the previous entry I wrote about an unsuccessful submission for the Venice Architecture Biennale Australian pavilion. As I noted, it grew out of an earlier internal ideas competition at Arup Sydney, in which I produced a set of 14 super-short stories, each pertaining to describe a particular Australian city of the future.

Jeremy Hight is a Los Angeles-based scholar, artist and educator. He is the author of numerous essays on locative media, narrative and augmented reality. I responded at length to his recent essay Writing Within the Map and as evidenced by the transcript below, Jeremy and I have been chatting back and forth for the last few weeks. The following conversation touches on space, media and some of Jeremy's earlier projects.

Why not be able to search a place for its stories, its poetry, and its metaphors and why not be able to select what you desire as well as be able to create such things specifically for this place itself?

This noise, this screeching, whining noise, has forever embedded itself in my auditory system as the sound of amazing things happening.

First, the long screech of the handshake; two machines sizing each other up. Questions asked and answered. Decisions made.

With both satisfied, the stuttering chatter. Quick as you can, what we have to say is too important to waste with frivolities.

In the silence — both machines process their exchange across the ether.

Somewhere, a bit flips. We repeat.

Update: Thanks to Chris for letting me know that, of course, Toshiba shamelessly ripped this advert off Simon Faithfull’s Escape Vehicle — which even has the original screeching noise.

Somewhere in the control room of my mind a fat little dwarf in a security outfit was paging through a Penthouse while smoking a cigar with his feet up on the table, watching the security monitors of my brain with his peripheral vision.

Linux users can take advantage of a number of documentation tools, including both free or open source software (FOSS) and proprietary software. All of them give technical writers the ability to author and publish professional documentation.