Joe Essid directs the Writing Center at the University of Richmond, where he teaches courses in writing and literature. He is a Richmond native who attended the University of Virginia and earned a Master's and PhD at Indiana University. His research interests include technology in the classroom and Southern literary humor. His academic writing has appeared in Computers and Humanities, The Writing Lab Newsletter, and anthologies about technology and writing. He is a contributor to Style Weekly and has appeared in Eighty One and RVA. Ignatius Onomatopoeia is the "avatar" who represents Joe in the game-world Second Life. Ignatius will be wandering the virtual terrain of Second Life while his creator writes here about what may be either "the next big thing" for the Internet or the latest darling of the cyber-hip... the reader can decide.
E-mail contact: jessid@mac.com | Web address: writing2.richmond.edu/jessid

Location: Sunland Freebie Store

Where virtual hillbillies tread…giant academic raccoons are sure to follow.

Beeble Baxter, my colleague at Richmond, ambled over to Sunland to chat up Barbara, a greeter robot who pays visitors 1 Linden Dollar to talk with her for 10 minutes.

That’s not good money, even by camping standards, but it enabled Beeb to try out some of the theories he’s been encountering in VA Commonwealth’s PhD program in Media, Art, and Text.

Beeb had a more enlightening, if less salacious, conversation with Barbara than did Pappy, and Beeb put Barbara in the context of a real-life conversation with another bot from a company’s live-chat system.  His ruminations—well, raccoons are not ruminants—his reflections can be found at Beeble’s Blog.

A.I. has made great strides since I first encountered the “Rogerian therapist” software named “Eliza” in the late 80s, but even after 20 years, bots remain a long way from passing The Turing Test.

That said, Beeb’s on to something here about how bots may enter our daily lives on this side of the screen (as with a voice-mail system that asks us questions), even if he has one claim utterly wrong:

I have NO idea where he got it into the his “durn fool head” that Pappy and Iggy are both under my control. Pappy is a law unto himself.

“And I are the bettur writur, Wiggly,” he told me to add here. “An’ the bettur Cassynova n’ awl-around Parry-more n’ yu o’ that-thar Shine-drinking raccoon! Jist ax them fake gals!”

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