Virtual Methods

that users converse with the robot as if it were human, even probing deeply personal
questions and engaging in discursive sexual intercourse with the robot). The
impersonal nature of chatting with a robot has had one striking consequence: the
robot receives several hundred more queries in a single month than are received by
the combined human editors of the CAC in an entire year. Being overtly nonhuman
coupled with the anonymity of online chatting seems to have facilitated
users to disclose more about themselves, to sustain conversations without fear of
becoming a nuisance, and to ask many more frank questions without concern for
being judged on the quality of the questions. The robot is itself merely a talking
version of a very large FAQ, with one distinct advantage: it has a human-like face
and a human voice, masking mechanical impersonality with programmed personality.
It can freely be flirted with and insulted; in turn, it can make sexual comments
of its own, fight back, or quickly lead the user into new subjects for
discussion. This is a degree of ‘interpersonal’ discourse that simply does not occur
between CAC editors and members of its public on an everyday basis.
ANACAONA is a ‘distortion’ in the CAC’s co-production network, involving different
sets of authors and interests and generating different types of consumption
patterns.
Cyber-cultural Patterns of Circulation
Centring the Links • 103
The fact that the CAC brings together numerous web sites into one directory,
numerous webmasters into one discussion and email list, and several researchers
into particular online publications, can serve to at least simulate a sense of collectivity,
and indirectly perhaps, a sense of centrality. One of these senses of collectivity,
especially among webmasters who have produced content that is then linked
and highlighted by the CAC, involves the question of common interests in
Caribbean indigenous issues. The second sense of collective orientations sometimes
involves related content (essays on Taino or Carib history and culture, information
on archaeological sites, language resources; sometimes sites will
appropriate content from other sites). Third, to some extent the various sites share
perspectives (exemplified by a shared idiom for discussing and presenting
Caribbean indigenous issues). A fourth facet relates to shared symbols in terms of
images that are often recycled from one site to another (petroglyphic icons, depictions
of shamanic objects, animal figures seen as sacred symbols in Amerindian
cosmologies). The fifth consists of boundaries (formed for example by sites crossreferencing
each other for users, by use of hyperlinks and ‘webrings’ and through
the granting of awards). A sixth involves mutual advantage (the legitimacy of each
site bolstered by the fact that other such sites exist as well, thus rendering any one
site less of a ‘one-click wonder’). The seventh consists of regular exchange (electronic
newsletters, email petitions, mailing lists, listservs, newsgroups, message