A common complaint of anthropologists, especially the traditional type, is that while you are in the field you really don’t get “time off.” You don’t go there only during business hours. It’s where you live. There’s no easy way to commute between your home institution and, lets say, a mountain village in China.

For those of us doing internet research it’s in theory a little easier. However, you can also get lulled into a false sense of security. And it’s that sort of liberal headed nonsense that gets one botted again.

MRZ, an old friend with a wicked sense of humor, just botted me. Basically he took my comments and fed them into Eliza, a classic AI program, and reposted them to my other site. And I just kept responding.

What this wonderfully illustrates, other than my general gullibility, is how important identity is in the mix. Because I knew that MRZ is a real person, I projected the rather odd posts that he was making onto him. And because of that I noticed, but failed to connect the obvious grammatical hints contained there in.

This issue of “laminated” identity is going to be a critical aspect to the overall formula for my analysis.