Finally Dissertating

I passed my quals, and now I am A Big Dork (ABD).

Being A Big Dork means that I need to start working on my dissertation. The main focus will be my four-level framework of self-presence based on Damasio's 3-level conception of the self plus one level I added on my own. Here are the basics:

Proto Self-Presence: The extent to which a media tool is accepted as a familiar and stable augmentation of an individual's body schema.

Core Self-Presence: The extent to which mediated interactions cause emotional responses in individuals.

Extended Self-Presence: The extent to which individuals' mediated interactions are held in memory and thus influence their mediated identity.

Network Self-Presence: The extent to which individuals’ mediated identity is influenced by some mediated social network.

Now to turn this into a theory paper and submit it to a conference on Virtual Worlds (FaVE). I'm not sure I'm really ready to do this, but I'd like to go to Berlin this summer. :)