Hi all, I just asked Elbot (http://www.elbot.com/), whom I featured as some kind of boundary condition in a chapter on CMC recently, on his opinion about this discussion, and he replied "I don't know. I also do not know what Furbys are. I just accept them and hope that they don't eat robots." After thinking a bit on the difference between CMC and ICT he also said that "The virtual difference is about 27 megabytes." Finally he added that we should realize how lucky we are we can communicate from human to human, and even computer-mediated! He wouldn't dare to be the computer though. And then went into some kind of mechanical laughter spasm. I know folks who remember when "online" was still "on-line" and meant sitting at a computer terminal. (Then, terminals were at a distance from the main computer). Times change, technologies change, terms change. Cheers, --u -- PD Dr. Ulf-Dietrich Reips President, Society for Computers in Psychology (http://scip.ws) Editor, International Journal of Internet Science (http://www.ijis.net) Universität Zürich Psychologisches Institut Rämistr. 62, 8001 Zürich, Switzerland *new address after Sept. 15: Binzmühlestr. 14/ Box 13, 8050 Zürich* iScience portal (http://psych-iscience.unizh.ch/)