A blog post via:

ishy29: http://www.plurk.com/p/ya8ff
Tuchiya Ayame: http://www.plurk.com/p/y98fp
kylel: http://www.plurk.com/p/y8qrc
DTz: http://www.plurk.com/p/y7lbb
starrag: http://www.plurk.com/p/yb3ur
wriver: http://www.plurk.com/p/x55rl

Plurk as a medium for communication is both a blessing and a curse, for in it there is the blessing of anonymity and the ability to communicate without the necessity of spoken words, but with anonymity comes the potential for the loss of self.

In each book we've read in Nanotexts, at some point or another, the question of identity has come up.

Casares. The fugitive is faced with the idea that everything he has done, everything he has created for Faustine, before Morel and the other mysterious inhabitants of the island, the recordings of Morel's invention. When they appear and disappear, he knows not if they are real or hallucinations caused by the island. Plurk records us, captures the moments of our lives online in a static timeline. Up up down down left right left right B A enter and soon we find ourselves dancing around each other.

What are our thoughts if words are but a disease? Part of how we define ourselves is by our minds. Burroughs. How much of who we are is ourselves, and how much is what we plurk? How easily do we identify ourselves through the medium of people lurking? Plurk further cuts up our conversations, breaking them down into bite sized components, micro blogs of information.

For many of us, I think our plurk identity has become as separate as a parapersonality, and for some, it's even spawned more. Our mind, our lucidity and thought have and can separate from our body via plurk. Plurk extends our thoughts, allows us to compile and compress data into 140 characters or less. A picture is worth 1000 words, but a link can be worth tenfold that. Plurk is the closest yet we've been able to achieve the metanovel of Postsingularity.

But as with any new technology, Plurk suffers its drawbacks. We are limited by words and what we can find. It's a two dimensional tool. For as much quality, thought provoking information that is shared, 5 more pieces of irrelevancy are to be found, but that's simply the nature of the superorganism. As with the regular organism, so much of the parts must spend themselves maintaining a status quo in order for the greater experiences to come about. Big Pig is the beezies and the orphidnet. The Queen City is the hive and the people in the city. The Hand is its agents and enemies as one. So then, our timelines are both the individual plurks, and the conversations as well as the greater trends those messages follow.