Final: Plurk

At first I didn’t really understand how Plurk was supposed to connect to class, but now that I’m looking back at this class from where I stand now, I recall what Tony told us on one of the first days of class: that this class is a superorganism. Plurk is a way for our superorganism to communicate, explore, teach, learn, share, and think together. It is a place where all our thoughts are intertwined and the combination of them adds up to something more. It brings to mind the word Gestalt, in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Plurk has become a tool in this class in which we can explore not only our own thoughts and feelings, but also others’ thoughts, and we can then piece together how technology is making that possible.

 

When reading Radical Alterity I connected a lot of what it was saying about communication to Plurk. Radical Alterity touched on some ideas such as going incognito as a common privilege, a disconnect between social reality and social roles, the lack of need for identification, and a paradox of communication in which the more we communicate the more we destroy the need for communication. All these ideas from Radical Alterity were easily connected to real life for me, and a big reason for that was the use of technological mediums in class. Plurk allowed me to directly see how a lack of identification allowed for relationships to grow and change in a way that they might not have in the strict social roles of face-to-face communication. This spectral communication that was referred to in Radical Alterity wasn’t just a phrase in a book, it was something I was experiencing for myself. At first I thought the paradox of communication didn’t really make much sense, but as the quarter went on I could see how communicating on Plurk made it a lot less necessary to communicate with my classmates during actual class. Thinking ahead to the forms of even more instantaneous communications that we read about in our texts, I can now see how things like the orphidnet and telepathy and a Hive mind like in Queen City Jazz, are just further progressions of things like Plurk. These also fit into the paradox of communication because with instant access to all the information in the world, communications shrinks.

 

Another recently discussed topic in class that reminds me of Plurk is this 4^th dimensional image of ourselves that we are constantly recreating and reforming. Plurk and blogs and Facebook allow us to be in control of part of this image of ourselves. Other parts of this image such as medical records, bank statements, etc aren’t so much in our control, but they are still part of this composite presentation of self that we are infatuated with. What it means to be human is perhaps changing with these new advancements in ways that we can present and express ourselves. The need to record and save isn’t seen in any other species and technology is making it more and more possible to do those things. Plurk is like a simpler form of Thuy’s metanovel in Postsingular. We can add together words, images, videos, voice recordings, etc to create and preserve a multi-media version of ourselves. Everything that formerly lived only in our imagination is getting closer and closer to reality. Humans are eager to finally be able to capture these parts of ourselves that were formerly intangible. We now have the capability to piece together parts of ourselves that we want to present to others and make those things physical and moldable at the touch of our hands. Or rather, the click of our mouse.