In The Company Of Bots

Student	Cristina Lavinia Cochior
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Work Description	Bots operate at the intersection of technical infrastructure and social agenthood. Although they follow strict rules dictated by platform specificity, their status of autonomy sets them apart from regular tools. Wikipedia bots, especially, are measured in terms of utility. In order for a bot to be allowed to run, its operator has to make an appeal to a specific congregation made up of mostly other bot operators, called the Bot Approval Group. This social gathering will then determine whether the bot qualifies as a member of the bot user group. However, despite the fact that they are defined by their purpose within the community, often these bots' role becomes obfuscated through the process of anthropomorphisation. In situations when the bot is no longer useful, the machine on which it was once hosted is not in service anymore, or their operator no longer has the time to maintain it, the bot will be 'retired'. The humanizing effect of such language points out to a deeper question: what is the purpose of the bot after it has fulfilled its job? What can the bot tell us about the community it was once a part of?
Bio	Cristina Cochior (RO) is a researcher, designer and bot custodian working in the Netherlands. Her interests revolve around automation practices, disruption of the interface and peer to machine knowledge production.
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