Territorial Violence and Design, 1950-2010: A Human-Computer Study of Personal Space and Chatbot Interaction

Personal space is a human’s imaginary system of precaution and an important concept for exploring territoriality, but between humans and technology because machinic agencies transfer, relocate, enact and reenact territorially. Literatures of territoriality, violence and affect are uniquely brought together, with chatbots as the research object to argue that their ongoing development as artificial agents, and the ambiguity of violence they can engender, have broader ramifications for a socio-technical research programme. These literatures help to understand the interrelation of virtual and actual spatiality relevant to research involving chatrooms and internet forums, automated systems and processes, as well as human and machine agencies; because all of these spaces, methods and agencies involve the personal sphere. The thesis is an ethical tale of cruel techno-science that is performed through conceptualisations from the creative arts, constituting a PhD by practice. This thesis chronicles four chatbots, taking into account interventions made in fine art, design, fiction and film that are omitted from a history of agent technology. The thesis re-interprets Edward Hall’s work on proxemics, personal space and territoriality, using techniques of the bricoleur and rudiments (an undeveloped and speculative method of practice), to understand chatbot techniques such as the pick-up, their entrapment logics, their repetitions of hateful speech, their nonsense talk (including how they disorientate spatial metaphors), as well as how developers switch on and off their learning functionality. Semi-structured interviews and online forum postings with chatbot developers were used to expand and reflect on the rudimentary method. To urge that this project is timely is itself a statement of anxiety. Chatbots can manipulate, exceed, and exhaust a human understanding of both space and time. Violence between humans and machines in online and offline spaces is explored as an interweaving of agency and spatiality. A series of rudiments were used to probe empirical experiments such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Tucker, 1950). The spatial metaphors of confinement as a parable of entrapment, are revealed within that logic and that of chatbots. The ‘Obedience to Authority’ experiments (Milgram, 1961) were used to reflect on the roles played by machines which are then reflected into a discussion of chatbots and the experiments done in and around them. The agency of the experimenter was revealed in the machine as evidenced with chatbots which has ethical ramifications. The argument of personal space is widened to include the ways machinic territoriality and its violence impacts on our ways of living together both in the private spheres of our computers and homes, as well as in state-regulated conditions (Directive-3, 2003). The misanthropic aspects of chatbot design are reflected through the methodology of designing out of fear. I argue that personal spaces create misanthropic design imperatives, methods and ways of living. Furthermore, the technological agencies of personal spaces have a confining impact on the transient spaces of the non-places in a wider discussion of the lift, chatroom and car. The violent origins of the chatbot are linked to various imaginings of impending disaster through visualisations, supported by case studies in fiction to look at the resonance of how anxiety transformed into terror when considering the affects of violence

2012-2013 Catalog

Graduate School catalog regarding admissions, curriculum and policies

Bowdoin Orient v.95, no.1-34 (1965-1966)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-1960s/1006/thumbnail.jp

Migration for ‘work and play’: hierarchies of privilege among Youth Mobility Scheme participants in London

This thesis is the first academic study of participants on the UK Youth Mobility Scheme (YMS), which replaced the earlier Working Holidaymaker Scheme in 2008. It foregrounds the sociologically informed framework of ‘lifestyle migration’ to understand YMS participants as migrants. In doing so, the thesis contends that binaries between tourism/migration, and tourism/work have oversimplified contemporary practices of youth mobility, and not addressed the ways in which they are increasingly regulated through state immigration regimes. Thus, the thesis begins by examining the policies regulating youth entry for ‘work and play’, tracing their historical context, silences and ‘dividing practices’. The thesis then draws on interviews with 29 men and women on YMS visas in 2014-2015, living and working in London, from seven of the eight countries eligible for the Scheme. Participant observation and social media analysis complement these interviews and policy analysis, comprising innovative multiple methods that address the ‘mobile field’. The retrospective motivations of young people participating in the scheme are analysed, together with their working lives and opportunities for leisure. The overall contention is that hierarchies of privilege shape the motivations, access, and experiences of YMS participants, constituted through gender, ‘race’/ethnicity, social class and nationality, with particularly marked fissures between those from Old Commonwealth countries and those from East Asian countries. In pursuit of this thesis four distinctive claims are made. First, the construction of ‘mobile subjects’ on YMS corresponds to ‘dividing practices’ and silences in the policy, funnelling ‘desirable’ and ‘non-risk’ participants to the UK and favouring those from the Old Commonwealth. Second, participants’ motivations to pursue YMS are influenced both by their national mobility imaginings, shaped alongside different historic-colonial links with Britain, and by personal reasons both practical and strategic. Third, participants’ experiences of labour market participation are both surprisingly diverse and polarised according to privileges stemming from nationality, gender, ‘race’, ethnicity, first language and historic mobilities to the UK. Finally, these differential sources of privilege contour the participants’ practices of ‘play’/leisure, resulting in largely ethnocentric and insular experiences that contradict the common scholarly association of youth mobility with cosmopolitanism