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.

Finalist for favorite TA

The Annenberg student body recent voted for favorite prof, TA and staffer. I was a finalist! I guess all the bribery paid off.

Here's the announcement:

ASCA announces its favorite professor, TA and staff person

The Annenberg Student Communication Association held its annual Favorite Professor, TA and Staff Person Awards Banquet on April 23 in the Annenberg West Wing Lobby. Nearly 300 undergraduate Communication students voted for this year's favorites.

This year's Favorite Professor was Stacy Smith. Ken Sereno and Josh Kun were Favorite Professor Finalists. Favorite TA honors went to Richard Lawrence. Finalists were Robby Ratan and D. Travers Scott. Favorite Staff Person was Maryann Wu. Finalists were Annie Mateen and Sarah Holdren.

El Cholo donated food for the event. The funds ASCA gathered from donations, along with the money that would have paid for the Mexican delicacies from El Cholo, was donated to Troy Camp-- a student run philanthropy that holds a summer camp and mentorship program for underprivileged children in the LA community. The event raised almost $650.

A 1988 take on Mario

I was there, but not aware.

Favorite line:
"Have you heard of Nintendo?"
"No, who is he?"

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. :)

Intro to question about self and identity in CMC and Virtual Environment research

I like this intro, now I have to write the essay...

Although the fields of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Virtual Environment (VE) research examine many similar concepts, their theoretical foundations and methodological approaches are often quite disparate. Arguably, there is a need for convergence between these fields because the media of CMC increasingly resemble VEs. The current paper addresses one area in which such a convergence is possible, the study of the self within mediated experiences. Broadly, CMC research treats the “self” as a complex formulation of identity, be it accurate or imagined. Alternatively, most VE research treats the self primarily as a physical entity, focusing on its sensory and motor connections to the VE. Drawing from research in both fields, a theoretical framework of self-presence is offered that has the potential to facilitate a confluence of CMC and VE theory and methodology. Specifically, this framework incorporates the complexity of CMC’s approach to identity as well as the neurophysiologically-grounded approach to the experience of self. Within the scope of this framework, a discussion of potential effects of current changes in our media landscape leads to a series of research questions that could provide insight into such effects.

Your face: A new measure of video game effects

This article about the Immersion Project describes a research dataset (also art collection) that is comprised of images of children's faces as they play videogames of varying violence. The article describes the project better than I can, but the takeaway point for me is that this is a creative measure of video game effects. If such facial expressions can be reliably (and automatically) coded by Ekman's Facial Action Coding System (FACS), maybe I can include a similar measure in my explorations of self-presence. Of course, psychophysiology has been wise to facial EMG measures to determine emotional valence for quite some time. But perhaps the FACS provides for a greater range of interpretations (i.e., not just positive/negative valence, but specification of the emotion). This is something to think about when I dig in for the dissertation, but right now I need to return to thinking about my quals (starting on Friday!!).

Here's the vid from the Immersion Project website:

...that is the question

TO BE
to blog post
to twitter
to update facebook status
to post a youtube video
to put up a picasa album
to yelp a bizznass
to review this seller
to review that product
to C-list missed connections (or casual encounters ;)
to send spam
to extend information tendrils into your environment

or NOT TO BE
to watch tv
to listen to radio
to read the paper
to sit on the sidewalk and watch the world go by