Plurking Metaphors

In his lecture we watched at the beginning of the quarter, DJ Spooky illustrated how our technological metaphors expand individual’s personas. He specifically noted how technology allows people to see and hear people without being in their physical presence, how the metaphors we create for ourselves have become more sophisticated than our biological mechanisms, and how technology eternalizes humans. While DJ Spooky was referring to the culmination of network technology, Plurk exemplifies these ideas in and of itself. By combining and linking a plethora of mediums, Plurk gives individuals incredible autonomy over their virtual presentation.

Through profile pictures and movie links, people can allow others to view their appearance without being in their physical presence. Since our class only met for three hours a week and we only played the name game once, Plurk provided a useful tool for putting names to faces, remembering the personalities behind those faces, and sharing images of ourselves outside of class.

Since our Plurk profiles exist outside of our organic bodies, they have the potential for eternal life. As the timeline of plurks explicitly illustrates, technology has allowed people to keep explicit records of their stream of consciousness, objectively check the material of information they presented in the past, and create personas that expand beyond the timelines of their artificial existence. While humans have mainly tried to pass on their heritage through memories in other people, representations of themselves in their children, and oral legacy, technologies like Plurk allow people to live on in a virtual reality without the necessity of their physical bodies.
If people learned our passwords or if a computer was programmed to emulate our behavior, they could continue to elaborate on our Plurk lives after our death. Even when we are still alive, we do not need to personally do anything to change our personas in such technologies. Although the media frenzy about identity theft typically refers to theft of financial information, it would be feasible for people to steal plurk or other network identities, and drastically alter others perception of ourselves. Or, taking a different spin, we could create doubles of ourselves by creating multiple profiles, each reflecting, yet transcending the other. As virtual personas become more prominent, the possibility for social identity theft and virtual cloning will dramatically alter the way we think about the individual.

Still, language and links played the most prominent role in Plurk communication. Most mediums (i.e. Facebook and Email) push people to reach tangible goals through their messages. Because the comments or messages only appear in certain pages or folders, these mediums encourage people to make intentional statements to an intended audience of one. With a timeline displaying plurks and responses to all friends and followers, Plurk celebrates stream of consciousness messages. Since anyone can view and respond to the messages, there need not be a single purpose or audience. Seen in the diversity of Plurk responses, Plurk encourages people to interpret the statement from their own paradigm and react with their own opinions, often transforming a single message into a group discussion immediately. For example, Gatticus elicited forty responses from nine different people simply by saying he “dislikes dealing with airlines and their money making schemes.” Although this statement was hardly profound, people were able to empathize and elaborate on his common opinion. Additionally, people can provide links to Youtube videos, articles, or anything else they feel like sharing. While this content is available outside of Plurk, these links provide a way to create networks of media and share our virtual journeys with each other.

With the ability to communicate with others and present our personalities in virtual space, more complex representations are possible. In physical space, I can only be in one place at a time whereas in virtual space I can be on Plurk, AIM, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and many more virtual places at once. Even within one of these places, I can create links between my own ideas, connect to other people’s ideas, and provide people a map to my personality and life. This allows for more sophisticated analysis of different facets of my personality than interaction with my physical self can allot.

Interestingly, the secrecy involved in presenting oneself in virtual space is different than the secrecy involved in presenting oneself in person. On Plurk and other networking sites, I can choose what images and videos of myself to display. Furthermore, I can hide the emotional tone of my comments by typing instead of speaking. Still, people have freedom over the parts of my self-presentation they wish to explore since I cannot direct them away from certain aspects directly. Paradoxically, Plurk provides the notion of more freedom of presentation and investigation.

For creatures that thrive off feedback from others, Plurk allows people to solicit specific responses from multiple people quickly and efficiently. Although computers have been deemed as vehicles for creating self-sufficiency and anti-social behavior, technologies like Plurk allow people to have more conversations than they could in person. Since personal information is already listed in people’s profiles, people are able to skip mundane introductions and move on to more meaningful conversation content. By allowing people to network their ideas quickly and efficiently, Plurk has the potential to improve self-esteem and friend acceptance. Inevitably, the opposite may be true if people feel like their biological mechanisms pale in comparison to the complexity and networking potentials of the technology. Currently, our bodies still need nourishment and physical pleasures play important roles in the development and well-being of individuals. By showing virtual possibilities beyond the capacity of our physical bodies, technologies may infantilize the biological organism. Perhaps this will drive humans to add more technology onto their persons, splice their genes with technology, and evolve into a post-human species. This may be one incentive economists have yet to predict.