Dissertation Prospectus Defense

BORING ALERT, BORING ALERT - this posting is BORING, meant mostly to serve as a bookmark for this milestone and a (public) record of my thinking at this time. Only big nerds should read on.

Today I defended my dissertation prospectus and was given the green light to move ahead (though I already have some pilot data that supports my theoretical framework of self-presence). My prospectus outlines my plan to develop and validate the Self-Presence Questionnaire (SPQ). This will involve a survey-based study and a few experiments. My committee was supportive and gave me great guidance. The most important points are as follows:

1. Don't just validate the SPQ and theory, examine the effects of self-presence. I had planned to do this, but they want more emphasis on the latter.

2. Self-presence is not likely to influence cognitive load and learning (I was possibly going to focus on these points), so consider other effects. There are two on the table, health-related behavior and interpersonal relationships. The former is a hot topic - Exergaming - but I have more experience with the latter. Also, my pilot data suggests a relationship between self-presence and social presence, which bodes well for an inquiry into the latter. Maybe I'll try to combine these and look at social exergaming!

3. Most importantly, I need to articulate why I care about self-presence and why it matters. I need to show my passion for developing an understanding of how people are extended into their virtual self-representations. Is it because I think the concept of the modern cyborg is cool? I do ruv technology. Is it because I think that this phenomenon is integral to our relationships with technology and thus can be utilized to guide the development of better tools? Sounds good to me. Can self-presence be used to promote world peace and unity? Possibly, but it's a stretch. So is this blog posting.

End boring transmission.

If you made it this far and would like to become unbored, you can watch this short film called Validation. I promise it has nothing to do with statistics.

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. :)