 Good morning. It's very hard to command attention when you're sitting in the back of a very large chair This is Bob Kavanaugh who many of you remember from last year when he was representing a somewhat different company and I'm going to have one of these nice cozy living room chats with Bob Kavanaugh sort of the way Your 10th year Okay, is your mic on yeah, okay, we have to move this up sure I think we tell the audience We have a technology problem. Just try it again where I put it Okay, it's it's bending the wrong way. He says it's a lady's mic. I take up in the room now. Yeah, okay So welcome back. Thank you The My first question is very simple and I hope we'll provoke along and Enlightening answer. Just Hollywood get it. Well, I guess we need to find it in Hollywood, huh? If you mean by Hollywood the creative community, yeah, that your clients in the word. Oh, I think In the last six months Year, but particularly last six months There's been a great interest in the creative community when I use the expression creative community Talking about novelists or screenwriters or actors actresses and directors And trying to understand, you know what this room talked about this morning and there are a set of Creative people and when I say creative in that in those venues that are experimenting with New technologies that allow them to express themselves differently. So I don't know if they meet the definition of get it yet But I could report to you That there's a big learning curve going on in the creative community well, if the I guess the definition of creating creative people getting it is understanding about Interactivity as well as just creating something that's linear and sticks there on somebody's screen. Well, yeah I've had Hundreds of meetings with people that everyone in the room, you know sees on the screen or produces things on the screen and You It's it's interesting taking a Screenwriter and showing them what is what you can do on the CD-ROM and so a creative artist We we have a library probably second to none on on the CD-ROMs that are produced and We do that just to show Our the talent, you know what can be done and so we kind of sort it in a way to show them different ways of using it and To see some of these minds Talk about the product that's out there today and off the same technology base What can be done with the product is quite enlightening? And we're beginning to see that have that conversation on online service as At 14 for an above below 14 for there is not a lot people come up with as creative ideas But at 14 for we're seeing a lot of creative ideas And on the producer side getting it means understanding that it's not broadcast It's not movies, but it's what we were talking about this morning. Yeah You know You're one of the people Esther that picked up early that interactivity has as much communications Attributes as it does information or entertainment attributes and Again in in the Hollywood creative community. There's that that beginning discovery That it's not just creating interesting content that would be on the end of the network But bringing people together that have a common interest Even though they may not know each other and so that opens up a whole new realm of Opportunity and and thought for them But do the do the producers understand that they're not going to be reaching a mass audience But perhaps it's something more like the the web we were talking about this morning Yeah Again, I I don't want to misrepresent the audience that that I think that the the Mature creative community in which I joined Fully understands that because this room doesn't fully understand it in terms of how to make money we when we when we as an example We brought the See CEOs of the three telephone companies that we are advising at Pacific Telesis and Nine X in Bell, Atlanta. They came to creative artists for a meeting not too long ago and we brought about four of the world's renowned directors and two two Most prominent actors and a vocalist To talk and we didn't know if we didn't have it. It's like your kind of conference You know just see what happens when you mix these different personalities together The creative people went right at the subject again that was at this morning. How are we going to make money? You know, we think we understand how you guys will make money, but how will we make money? and so, you know it is and It's a very important subject and one that this room needs to noodle through But this room will have a large influence probably not control but an influence over the answer to that question But it that question should not take away From what I think is more important is that we are creating a palette For a very new form of creativity. What is on CD-ROM today is Neanderthal man to where it's going to be and we have not seen the product in CD-ROM or online service That people will remember and you know, I think we're within a year or two of People breaking through with very unique product that becomes What's your man's these company? You know did to the PC the Lotus one two three and it's going to have the attributes of storytelling in it Well, if it's one two three then it's a mass market tool So it's something that lets people create their own CD-ROMs Well, I didn't mean that it's the same economic model as one two three, which is a mass market to them I was talking about having a product that that has good storyline and character development and an ability for people to communicate In an easy way and that the interfaces are fun, and I didn't see what you showed yesterday, but a number of people told me That there was an in very interesting Vietnam Product that is shown but sounds like that is on this yellow brick road to its innovation in this area Actually, I should mention for the audience we talked with David Liddell from interval research and When the product is out everybody in the audience and you too is going to get a copy of it from us And I'm good This is actually a very interesting economic difference because yeah the value of one two three or of some other products from other large companies is precisely that their standards and Million the millionth copy is more valuable than the first copy but In Hollywood diversity is valuable these things have a shorter shelf life and People want variety whereas in the other market people want standards Well, you know this phenomenon is being played out in in the television world. And by the way, can I just make I'm going in 1995. I'm like the equivalent of going to graduate school I'm not an expert on the entertainment industry. I joined but I wanted to learn it and so you know more than we do Yeah, but I don't know everything that I want to know And I've been spending which was not anticipated a lot of time in cable channels. There are a tremendous number of Proposals out there to create a cable channel now. It is in the area. You're asking me about in terms of its these are Market segments that are well identified a cable channel for single adults a cable channel for gardeners a cable channel for fashion and When you start working the economics of that it becomes very difficult you know to make sure you get the carriage show which is which is a difficult thing and Work a new form of a Advertising model that is more like a narrow cast advertising model therefore The rate per unit possibly can be higher because you have a an audience that has a predetermined interest in your subject And so that is being worked out today I think that that is relevant to this room because if we can be successful in bringing out successful from an economic standpoint of bringing out Channels for special purpose That is profitable and yet me audience segments and we have an advertising model to build behind it that same model Becomes Portable into the online environment Because we're moving more and more to where we as a customer will hold the auction as Opposed to the one who has the product holding the auction. Yeah, but this so you you move over the segmentation But the actual dynamics of it would change some yeah, well because you know One of the interesting things that I learned is on MTV at any given moment There's no more than a half a million people watching And yet it sounds like a lot to some of us. Yeah, well, it's not it's not a lot from a television viewing standpoint But it's a very profitable an important venue on television because it it's identified with a generation In terms of its brand and and its personality And I think that that MTV model is Portable into other segments so First I asked you whether Hollywood gets it now. Does this industry get it about Hollywood? Well, I don't if I'm representative of the room and I may not be You know, I went into it with stereotypes that were wrong So it's quite conceivable probable that within this room are Stereotypes that are wrong and by the way they have stereotypes about the room that are that are not accurate There are two levels of Hollywood. One is the creative community And the others are the studios the productive Production community The creative community are filled with incredibly bright capable people and and those human beings They are the generation behind them that are getting that training will be The creative people working on the venues that some of the people in this room are working on I mean, there's no question in my mind that the training of Artists is a training for people who will create wonderful interactive product that it's a Training that has been developed over centuries and you know and the rules of storytelling and fantasy the rules of captivating our mind even from an information standpoint not just an entertainment standpoint are fairly well disciplined and And those people are now looking at what this room is doing and I think they're beginning to Understand it the interesting thing and I would you know I find it interesting as I scan down who was in this room today versus 10 years ago It's it's changed dramatically. Well, I would I would offer and I'm not a futurist But over the next several years you will have a higher mix you should have a higher mix of creative people And you and I talk privately about maybe we should have one of the creative people be here That should be done because I think We'll all find it very interesting and how they think and how you know if we looked at a CD-ROM product an online service and talk to some of the best minds in the creative community It's eye-opener how they look at it and what they think about it's a different set of thoughts than we normally have And what about the production community? I don't know it that well. You have some people in the room here from Disney and Viacom who probably know it better than I do You know one of again one of my stereotypes is that when you thought of Paramount or you thought of MGM or Disney or You know 20th century you thought of film studios But as you go into those companies and understand what's in them That is only one division under the management of most of those companies is film television publishing book and magazine In music and Then almost all of them if not all them have interactivity and so they have a bubbling new Department now, I think that's significant because the stereotype is what the heck does a film? Yeah, we won't even need a a A Motion picture lot anymore will do it on computer animation, but that is a misunderstanding of the assets of those companies I'm not saying that the management of those companies will all know how to manage the assets going forward, but the Editing capability the the ability of converting a screenplay into something that is compelling Is very relevant and there they are learning more and more how to move across venue So they take a product a storyline that goes into a novel goes into Television goes into a by the way theme parks most of them have theme parks And we'll see it move into probably more into gambling environments and things like that. So those companies Are moving their their their competencies across All of the venues some of them Will accomplish that journey and probably be major major players notwithstanding the fact that there's probably more Niche markets that will get created in that process. I want to pick up on this Notion of what a creative asset is and it It's also We were talking earlier how Attention is the scarce resource, right? It's it's people's attention and when you had broadcast TV You could capture people's attention with commercials even ones that were irritating perhaps and There's a lot of equity that's being built up over 1015 or even whatever lucky strike was 50 years But as the market becomes more fragmented The the government's website according to Mike Nelson is the most popular. I'm not sure that's because It has the most compelling content, but because it's the government and people Know what it is and they have to pay attention to what it's doing. So it seems to me that the thing that attracts attention now Fundamentally is going to be stars It's in the end people identify most with a human being Michael Jackson Your list of clients They they end up being the the only scarce resource that really can't be replicated. I Believe that it's interesting We Mike Ovitz who I work with Versus is one of these people with incredibly broad and creative mind and In July when I first arrived there, we were talking about navigation again something that was kind of briefly touched upon earlier this morning and and He came at navigation totally different from at least the way I was thinking about it and many people around me were thinking about He sees navigation being more human like Either in human like attributes or actor in fact being a human being so that when we brought the three telephone companies together To form this media company We went to one of the top personalities in the entertainment industry Who who is a hacker? Who's the guy we mentioned once? Yes? Esther knows what I'm talking about. He did a film About a a marriage that didn't make it so he came back as a the housekeeper. Oh that one and So we asked a few Would would and we so we told him that we would like to show them a different form of navigation So he said I want to be the navigator you know meet me at Santa Monica Beach and With a film crew and we'll do a navigator for so we went down there in late July and he arrived in a Sweatsuit and takes over sweatsuit and he has a bathing suit on and he had a bag of things and one of them was a A like a pirates hat You know the three-pointed pirates and and he goes into the ocean and he says okay as I have start walking out roll the camera And we did one take it was this was not a heavy-duty production and he Waves to the camera and says hi I'm your navigator. You thought it was an information highway out there. It's not an information highway It's an information ocean But I won't navigate you through the information notion now. Let me just stop there I sat there saying my god he changed the metaphor right and and the notion is a seems to me to be a much better metaphor from what we're talking about than a highway and Then he and then he set up the need for navigation, which is actually a nautical term And not a highway term and then he did a routine that that was fantastic He said and I'm gonna guide you through the information highway if you want a You know a children's show and he gets into this voice of Barney and he starts talking We're gonna have the Barney, but if you want to go shopping you'll get shop at Barney's and he gets this kind of Stuffy voice of a salesman and he said now if you if you want to gain information You can go to the how do you do it? You go to the Smithsonian Institute on channel so-and-so and learn all about Babylonian Tupperware It just came out Babylonian Tupperware and he went through and he did a Julia child thing You take the little chicken legs and spread them like this And he did 15 minutes now We did minimal edits and we showed it to the three companies who are spending billions building out a Broadband network and showed them this form of navigation. We also showed them with voice Recognition that you know that is coming down the path at the right price point that you could actually guide the navigator And there was some conversation earlier this morning. So your point about stars or I Would strike the word stars but personality driven People you could identify with during different parts of the day You could have different kinds of navigators depending on the audience you as an individual You could have loaded on the server many Navigators and you could select your navigator and I guess it becomes an intelligent agent after a while but but that change of paradigm from navigation as icon driven To navigation as human driven I found startling and what turned out to be our three clients found I think very intriguing Well, maybe we can show that film next year. Okay, or show that navigator I'm going to leave The continuation of this particular piece of the conversation to Jerry, but I just want to ask you one more thing Which is what did you learn at AT&T? I? Asked you about what you learned in Hollywood. What did you learn at AT&T? Well, I was at AT&T for ten years and I Was brought in AT&T right after the divestiture to be the chief financial officer and as chief financial officer AT&T I came to your conference in 86 with Vittorio Casoni because I You know, I felt at the time that the company being a communications company needed to Better understand this burgeoning world of computers, but that's where we were at the time So I kind of have been traveling this path AT&T was traumatized in 84 externally by the breakup and because of that trauma Everything was up for grabs in terms of reordering the assets and we reorganized the company and I think made it Very healthy focused business and even though it's tried to say deploying quality principles on the way and Before I left I had an organization of 40,000 people And was part of the being responsible for AT&T strategy I'll tell you a major thing that I that I learned that it's relevant to a company of 15 as it is 40,000 and it's around this concept of empowerment The people of AT&T are incredibly capable they can compete with anyone and the question for AT&T or any large company or a 15 person company can you provide the right environment and Organize the people and give them the space to do great things and eliminate the barriers and There were situations which we did terrific, I mean a lot of it is in the success One that I'll mention here Which was probably my biggest failure at AT&T was in the last year where I broke that rule on empowerment and that a Bernie La Crude and I and Bernie and Clina Perkins had this idea that we're entering a period where a Handwriting environment could get created and we put to assemble the technology pieces and created a company called EO the rule that I broke is that I In that CEO of the multimedia business of AT&T. I'm a figurative leader And I became an advocate on that particular project And so we obviously got the funding for the project because I wanted to do it And then I went you know, I had a ton of other things to do So I had others carry it out, but the problem was it was always seen as my project Because I started it and it put a spin on the ball in terms of logical thinking within AT&T and how to deal You know with the challenges that that company faced and a number of decisions were made in hindsight I see because they were trying to do what they thought I wanted them to do and that when you empower an Organization you should let them know what the objectives are You know what the boundary conditions are and let them go and do it and I didn't do that I went way in started the thing it became known as mine and therefore It you know it did not succeed because I broke that important rule So AT&T has taught me you know a lot of lessons and one of them is you know setting up your organization To succeed and allowing great people to do good things It is the rule of leadership and once you break that and try to meddle down in there Or you can get yourself in trouble and so I've I learned by my successes and my failures Well, did you did you pick the wrong project or did you make it fail? No, no, I think it was a good project and But we Decisions were made again in hindsight that that moved it in in the direction that it landed up in Which I think was more reflective what people thought I would want It's conceivable to me that the project should have been killed a lot earlier But it's not what Bob would want and the only point I'm making is you know that in in a leadership role We got to be those of you who run your companies or run departments or divisions or subsidiaries You need to be very careful and when you put your point of view forward Because if you put it forward too far the organization will use that as a As a point in which They'll hear it as a mandate and it's not necessary that it's going to be successful Thanks, sounds like somebody asking somebody to kill a priest Okay, Jerry your turn. Thank you very much This is the beginning of our panel on virtual places and people and I'm really excited because the people we have on this panel are diverse each of them Fascinating and I think the interactions will be really spectacular my job right now is to briefly Introduce you to Sherry Turkle whom you may know as the author of the second self and Who teaches at MIT and is currently working on another book? She has been Exploring this idea of online spaces and personalities first hand She's been in the trenches doing stuff and interacting and I think you'll find what she has to tell you Really exciting and startling and remarkable Sherry if you'll Come up and tell us what you'd like. Well, I'm gonna try to be exciting What was the second? Remarkable was third Well, I feel safest in being remarkable by beginning by quoting not from myself, but from a poet Long before there were computers internets or virtual communities Walt Whitman wrote There was a child went forth every day and the first object he looked upon That object he became These few lines by a poet not a social scientist are the touchstone for my work They speak to the importance of a psychological and a clinical perspective To the development of the computer culture We make our objects and in turn our objects make us What are we becoming? When the objects we look upon often for many of us the first objects we look upon every day our virtual objects For the past several years as Jerry said I've been involved in an ethnographic and clinical study of people and their virtual cells This morning. I'm going to try to begin our discussion of virtual people in places by talking about some ways in which virtual Experiences can impact on personal identity and indeed how it can challenge The very thing the very construct that we've traditionally called identity This can happen in many different types of virtual communities. It can happen on America online It could even happen in email in order to make my points very quickly and very dramatically. I'm going to pick a quick and dramatic example Which takes some of the issues really to the highest power So I'm going to be talking about people who are engaged in muds or multi-user dungeons We're actually they're participating in virtual communities with other people on a regular basis Muds for those of you who don't know or multi-user dungeons multi-user domains You join one very simply through a telnet command that links your computer to a computer that holds the mud program It's not difficult to make this connection. It just takes internet access You create a character several characters you specify their genders and other physical and psychological attributes Then as that character you move through virtual spaces in which you meet and are able to communicate in both word and action With other characters in other words with other characters who were there in the place of the people behind them In some muds players are invited to help build the virtual world itself to make places and objects in that space and Specify how they look and how they work So the first mud player I ever met was an 11 year old who built a room. She called the condo It's beautifully furnished. She has created magical jewelry and makeup for her dressing table when she visits the condo She invites her friends. She chats. She orders a virtual pizza and she flirts. In other words, she's 13 years old Other players have more varied social lives They create characters who have casual and romantic sex whole jobs attend rituals and celebrations Fall in love get married Now to say the least such goings-on are gripping This is more real than my real life says one character who turns out to be a man playing a woman pretending to be a man Mud players are mud authors. They're creating as well as consuming the content of their media So this makes muds a new genre of artistic endeavor with many things in common with performance art street theater Improvisational theater, Comedia de Lorte and script writing But muds are something else as well something closer to my area of expertise Because as players participate in muds, they're becoming authors not only of the text, but of themselves Not only of the text, but of themselves They're constructing themselves through virtual social interaction So one player says you are the character and you're not the character both at the same time and another ads You are who you pretend to be in virtual communities One's body is represented by textual description so the obese can be slender the beautiful can be plain The nerdy can be elegant and sophisticated Many of you have seen and joked about the New Yorker Cartoon in which one dog says to another on the internet. Nobody knows you're a dog The anonymity that's being referred to there that's made possible in virtual communities Provides ample room for individuals to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self There's unrivaled opportunity to play with one's identity and to try out new ones Indeed as I've suggested muds make possible the construction of an identity that is so fluid and multiple that it strains the very limits of the notion Identity after all literally means one and when we live through electronic self representations We have unlimited possibilities to be many In some ways the issue of virtual selves provoke a new discourse about identity and authenticity Which run in parallel with some of those that are posed by psychoactive medication? If a patient on Prozac tells his therapist that he feels more like himself With the drug than without it. What does this do to our standard notions of a real self? Where does real life end and a game begin as a parallel question? Is the real self always the quote naturally occurring one the one without the drug the one without the extension of self in the virtual community is the real self always the one in the physical world as More and more of real business real business defined as money-making business. Let's say Gets done in cyberspace couldn't be the real self be the self that functions in that realm In traditional theater and in role-playing games that take place in physical space One steps in and out of character Muds in contrast virtual communities in contrast offer a parallel life Dedicated muds players for example are often people who work almost all day with computers at their regular jobs the job the The communications program the muds are all on different windows of their computer screen all at the same time And as people play on muds they periodically put their characters to sleep But remain logged on to the game while they pursue these other activities from time to time They return to the game space and in this way they break up their day and the game space and They experience their lives as a cycling through I like this term I use it a lot as a cycling through the real world The RL as it's known in mud parlance and a series of virtual ones Some mutters go so far as to challenge the idea of giving any priority to the RL After all says one player why grant such superior status to the self that has the body When the selves that don't have bodies are able to have different kinds of experiences This kind of cycling through interaction with muds is made possible by the existence of windows Which are a way of course of working with the computer that makes it possible for the machine to place you in several contexts at the same time Your identity on the computer you could think of as the sum of your distributed presence Let me tell a quick case Doug is a Dartmouth college junior majoring in business for whom a mud represents one window and real life or RL represents another Doug plays four characters distributed across three different mugs One is a seductive woman one is a macho cowboy type who self-description stresses that he's a Marl borough's Marl borough's rolled in the t-shirts leave kind of guy That's his character description Then there's a rabbit of unspecified gender who wanders its muds introducing people to each other a character. He calls carrot Doug says carrot is so low-key that people let it be around while they're having private conversations So I think of carrot as my passive voyeuristic character Actually Doug has a fourth and final character Which is one that he only plays on furry mugs now These are mugs that are known as places of sexual experimentation where all the characters are furry animals And he says to me I'd rather not even talk about that character because it's anonymity there is very important to me He says let's just say that on furry mugs. I feel like a sexual tourist Doug talks about playing his characters in windows And he says that using windows has enhanced his ability to turn pieces of his mind on and off He says I split my mind. I'm getting better at it I can see myself as being two or three or more and I just turn on one part of my mind And then another when I go from window to window RL says Doug is just one more window and he adds It's not usually my best one RL is just one more window and it's not usually my best one The development of the windows metaphor for computer Interfaces was a technical motivation which is motivated by the desire to get people working more efficiently by cycling through different applications But in practice and social practice windows have become a powerful metaphor for people thinking about the self as a multiple and distributed system The self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings Something that people experience when for example you wake up as a lover you make breakfast as a mother and you drive to work as a lawyer The life practice of windows is of a distributed self that exists in many worlds and plays many roles All at the same time Muds extends the metaphor now RL itself as Doug says can be just one more window But mutters don't just become who they play they play who they are or what they want to be Players sometimes talk about their real selves as a composite of their characters And they sometimes talk about their mud characters as a means of working on their RL lives For some people muds provide what the psychoanalyst Eric Erickson would have called a psychosocial moratorium This notion of the moratorium Was a central element in how Eric Erickson thought about identity development particularly in adolescence and although the term moratorium Means literally a time out what Erickson had in mind was not withdrawal on the contrary The adolescent moratorium is a time of intense Interaction with people and ideas. It's a positive active phase of life It's a time of passionate friendships and experimentation the moratorium is not on significant experiences But on their consequences now, what does this sound like this sounds like life on the internet? This sounds like life on the screen It's a time of passionate friendships passionate experimentation But without consequences. It's a time during which one's actions in adolescence for example in his example are not counted So free from consequence experimentation becomes the norm rather than a brave departure Consequence free experimentation Facilitates the development of a core self a personal sense of what gives life meaning that Erickson called identity Now Erickson developed these ideas about the importance of a moratorium during the 1950s and early 1960s At that time the notion corresponded to a common understanding of what the quote college years were about Today 30 years later the idea of the college years as a consequence free time out Really seem of another era College is pre-professional and AIDS has made consequence free sexual experimentation impossibility The years associated with adolescence no longer seem a time out But if our culture no longer if our RL no longer offers an adolescent moratorium Virtual communities do it is part of what makes them seem so attractive Erickson's ideas about stages did not suggest rigid sequences His stages describe what people need to achieve before they can easily move ahead to another task For example Erickson pointed out that successful intimacy in young adulthood is difficult If you don't come to it with a sense of who you are Which is of course the challenge of the stage before the stage of adolescent identity building in real life However, people frequently move on with serious deficits with Incompletely resolved stages. They simply do the best they can They use whatever materials they have at hand to get as much as they can of what they have missed Muds life on the internet are dramatic examples offer dramatic examples of how Technology is coming to play a role in these everyday dramas of self-reparation time in cyberspace reworks the notion of a vacation and it reworks the notion of a moratorium Because they may now exist in an always available window From my point of view for thinking about identity in a culture of simulation the citizens of muds are our pioneers I'd like to end with a personal story About my life on a mud One day I came across a reference to a character called dr. Sherry This was a cyber psychotherapist I'm a psychotherapist who has an office in the rambling house that constitutes this particular muds virtual geography There I'm told dr. Sherry administers questionnaires and interviews people About their experiences on muds in the psychology of mudding Now I have every reason to believe that the name dr. Sherry Refers to my 15-year career as a student of the psychology of technology But I didn't create dr. Sherry dr. Sherry is me, but she's not Mine dr. Sherry is a character created by another player On the mud my character has another name and I don't give out questionnaires and conduct interviews my Methodology for doing my work as I sort of insist that I don't report on anyone unless I have them in a very very traditional RL face-to-face clinical setting so I'm not dr. Sherry She's a character name that somebody else created in order to quickly communicate and interest in this kind of stuff and a certain set of Questions about technology and the self so I experience dr. Sherry as a piece of my history Spinning out of control. I try to quiet my mind. I tell myself that One's books one's public and intellectual persona are pieces of oneself in the world for other people to use as they please Surely this virtual appropriation is kind of the highest form of flattery But my disquiet continues because dr. Sherry after all isn't in an animate book or an object in the world she's a person or He's a person or at least it's a person behind a character who's meeting with others in the world in the mud world at least I mean I get myself all confused and I talk my disquiet over with a friend who raises the Conversation stopping question. Well, would you prefer if dr. Sherry were a bot? Now this is an intelligent computer program an agent an artificial intelligence agent that roams this mud What I prefer if it was a bot an artificial intelligence that was trained to interview people about life on the mud This had not occurred to me, but in a flash. I realize that this too is possible It's even likely to be the case because many bots or puppets roamed this mud Characters played by people are often mistaken for these little artificial intelligences In fact Doug the college junior who I just quoted to you has this character carrot Who's often mistaken for a robot because the character is so passive And I myself have made this mistake with a bot called Julia when she offered me directions or remembered my name I was kind of flattered into thinking that this had was a real person and had an embarrassing moment or two until I figured out that It was a robot So I'm confronted with a double that could be a person or a program It's kind of new take on Philip Roth's problem in operation Shiloh The dr. Sherry story dramatizes how computational Experiences in fact dr. Sherry wasn't a robot or a person. It was a group of three people who together Created a character so even on muds you can have multiple personalities in one character itself The dr. Sherry story I tell and I share with you because for me it dramatizes yet another way in which computational Experiences can serve as evocative experiences for thinking about human identity in a culture of simulation and about a whole new World of relationships that we're going to have with machines artificial intelligences and virtual others People decide that they want to interact with others in a multi-user computer environment They think they'll have new access to people and information and there's little question that they do But then they find themselves in a mud they find themselves assuming multiple persona on computer networks They're swept up in experiences which challenge their ideas about a unitary self They meet their double and it's a cyborg One way of summing all of this up is to say that experiences on the internet bring post modernism down to earth And as I've said for thinking about identity in a culture of simulation the citizens of muds are pioneers Thank you very much. I'd like to ask our other three panelists to please come up and join us up here That was a wonderful introduction to the nature of identity and character out there in this strange space