"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"Question 2. Plurk: Without it the class would not be the class. Using the texts we have read in class explain how plurk fits in with the issues of technology and the human body that we have discussed thus far.
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."
"I don't much care where..."
"Then it doesn't much matter which way you go."
"...so long as I get somewhere."
"Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough."
I see aspects of the Plurk medium in all of the texts we have read, but some seem to mesh with it better than others. There are so many topics that could be discussed in relation to Plurk, so to keep this blog post from turning into a full-length essay (which would be interesting of course, but I am operating under time constraints), I will limit my discussion of topics in the texts and how they relate. What I write here are not the only topics or ideas I see going on in the text, just the ones that I think relate the best to Plurk.
One of the more unique features of Plurk, at least compared to other microblogs like Twitter, is how plurks are displayed in multiple overlaid timelines. With Plurk we can see not only everything that we have plurked on any given day at any given time, but also what everyone else we have friended or are a fan of have plurked. Ever since its inception, Plurk has been recording everything everyone has done on Plurk. The results we can see are in many respects similar to Morel’s invention. Through the Plurk timeline we can track the repetitive thoughts and activities of multiple people. But being recordings, there is a disconnect between the static thoughts and activities recorded and the dynamic people behind them. Long after they have moved on to other things, conceivably even after they are dead, these plurks will live on. In other words, what they have done in allowing themselves to be recorded is made an immortal copy of themselves: a double, a doppelganger, a caricature, a character. Though this double does not literally seek to overthrow as Ned Slade/Greg Feely’s does in the Filth nor does it replace us entirely like the nants in Postsingular, it does become us in certain respects. Who other people think we are is no longer set by the mask we choose to show to the world. The ability Plurk allots them to be able to access the recorded evidence of your personality means that they will take your double as you. However, Plurk also allows us to determine our reflection. A rarely used feature of Plurk is the ability to edit and delete the plurks that one has made, even long ago. This may be equivalent to changing our prerecordings, which Burroughs encourages us to do, but it also allows us in a way to travel through time and change history. We may not need to be as careful as the guys in Primer to avoid time paradoxes, but nevertheless, when we do this we destroy the old history completely and put a new one in its place. Thus, the future (that is to say, our future selves) becomes the double that seeks to overthrow the past and present.
As a textual and metatextual environment, Plurk affords us with certain advantages and disadvantages. Like all text-based mediums, we are unable to convey things like tone and emotion in the way we can in a real conversation; an issue of perhaps surprising importance in the Diamond Age. On the other hand, we are given a variety of hypertext options. Things like emoticons and italics can be used to replace emotional tone and emphasis, but only if the other person understands the implied context; ☺ will always be woefully inadequate to express the full range of expressions and feelings present in a single instance of happiness. Thus, we are replacing the signifier with the signified and introducing an additional layer of unreality through emotion symbols. On the other hand, Plurk offers us certain metatextual options not present in normal conversation; namely, the ability to plurk pictures and even video directly. Thus, where we would normally say “apple” in conversation and the word would invoke two completely different pictures in our heads (say I think of a granny smith and you think of a red delicious), now we can express exactly the apple we mean, as this dinosaur comic hilariously demonstrates:
http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001471.html
What is going on here is the opposite of the emoticon/italics issue, and very much related to the theme of the doppelganger. When the signifier becomes the signified, the signifier ceases to exist and all that remains is a symbol without a referent, what Baudrillard calls a “second-order simulacrum.” Although he does not go into it in as much detail in Radical Alterity as he does in The Precession of the Simulacra, it is very closely related to his discussion of the Other in RA. One of the issues with propagating second-order simulacra is what Baudrillard calls the “termination of history.” This comes about because of a lack of opposing elements (i.e. the Other) in society, which is the focus of RA.
The 140-character limit imposed by Plurk also offers us a challenge. When we Plurk our lives we cannot fill in all the details and must learn to write small. Ideally one can write small by merely excluding extraneous information, but often there is only so little in the way of redundancy and unnecessarily long sentence constructions. Instead what we find ourselves doing is making choices about which details to leave out, which details are important. In writing small we learn to think small and consider what “really matters.” In thinking small we become small, we make our lives small by removing details and trying to find what is “essential” about each particular event. What is ultimately essential in all of the events and thoughts of our lives is us, that is, our identity, and what we learn is that our identity is composed of small things. Here is where Ribofunk and Life Extreme (also possibly Feynman’s lecture) can enter into the picture. What we are talking about in all of these texts is making information small, important information, information about our identities. Ribofunk and Life Extreme are concerned more specifically with the way DNA and genetic engineering makes information small. DNA (to give a grossly oversimplified and incomplete picture) is a very simple Turing-like system in which blueprints of a cell (its identity) are copied and distributed. We are essentially doing the same thing on Plurk when we write about our lives, but instead of genes we use memes. A meme is defined on Wikipedia as “a postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices that gets transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena.” These are the building blocks that form our identities, and like genes, they can be changed. Just like the cells of our body, our memetic identity is also susceptible to word viruses. In comes Burroughs again. I have previously explored this phenomenon so without repeating myself too much, it is more accurate to consider word viruses as a kind of meme as well. Burroughs offers us a way to take apart these building blocks and put them back together through the cut-up technique, and it also doubles as a way to inoculate ourselves from the more dangerous memes like rational thought. Although Plurk has no feature to help us do this (an excellent idea for an add-on though!), the 140-character limit again forces us to fragment our thoughts, making it easier for others to reassemble them in whatever order appeals most.
No comments:
Post a Comment