Plurk

Plurk

Plurk has been a surprise for me. At first I wasn’t very comfortable with its format and design. I wasn’t used to sharing with people the little things throughout the day or checking a site as often. The basic concepts of plurk are easy to understand or one could say compare. For one, it’s much more interactive than other social network sites. It depends much less on visual stimulation, requires its users to limit their words, provides incentive to check regularly, and is one of the best catalysts of conversation. These are the basic structural differences with other social network sites, in my opinion. There are more subtle differences though that are hard to notice.

  Plurk seems to function as a singularity at times and other times it’s apparent that the small nano-characteristics have an equal stake in its appearance. To me it functions a bit like a program in which it is both easy to see the sum of its parts but with a change of perspective you say individual programs coming together to give the appearance of a larger multi-functioning organism. Plurk exists in a digital online world, but it’s just as alive as any other organism. It’s obviously not in need of physical nourishment like we know it but it’s still needs input to stay alive. The physical characters we input are its food and nourishment. Without denial, I think it’s fair to say that it grows the more we feed it but not in the traditional sense of physical growth. The Filth in particular really illuminates what I’m talking about. The author’s own vision of future planet earth depends on his own interpretation of growth. I think that one thing I can definitely draw from his interpretation is that growth is ultimately the strengthening of previous characteristics. The prevalence of what we know as “deviant” sexuality in The Filth is a representation of how characteristics naturally become more of what they already are. Because a characteristic persists and lives on it naturally becomes stronger. I see a bit of Darwinism here but on a more emotional and mental level.

  For example, an emotional feature or characteristic on plurk that over time gains popularity with the readers tends to flourish over time. If a user experiences a high volume of other readers participation than the writer will be motivated to publish in this likeness again in the future. I’m not trying to make a science of plurk but I’m just pointing out its characteristics. On plurk we become more of what we already are. At first it’s a scary proposition to lay this out for people to interpret. Plurk warms us up to that activity until things like karma aren’t really important and plurk becomes an outlet, a part of your consciousness. I really do admire this about plurk. Maybe more than anything I have been lucky with the people that I began plurking with. But I really do believe regardless that out revelations only increase in their “secret” quality I guess you could say.

  One of the best quotes in regards to this is from Life Extreme; a quote from Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.

  “It is not true that unconscious goal in the evolution of every conscious being (animal, man, mankind, etc) is its “highest happiness”; the case, on the contrary, is that every stage of evolution possesses a special and incomparable happiness neither higher no lower but simply it’s own. Evolution does not have happiness in view, but evolution and nothing else…

  To finalize this idea, I want to involve my own faith and prevalence of my own ideas in my work. For whatever reason I have a hard time detaching myself from my line of thinking. Plurk has proven in many ways that I do two things at one time when I write an entry. On one hand I censor what I say and on the other I can’t really control what comes out. The emotion of what is being said really can’t be dictated, but I can sensor what emote about, if that makes sense. If I’m feeling happy or content my comment must in some manner reflect that, It will reflect it in the manner that I feel most comfortable with. The manner tends to project that I am calm and in control and that I am enjoying my life regardless. It also says that I want to find my place relative to other beings. That I’m curious to find out how the journey goes for them, life that is.

  Plurk is one of the few things I will carry on with from an old class. I feel plurk is one of the most productive things I can do online. Perhaps it is because of the individuals I began this with but the dialogue is utterly engaging and informative. I get off plurk feeling better than I got on. I always have learned something new. I can get a laugh. I can find an awesome song or band I have never heard. I can get whatever I want from a Plurk. An online world but devoid of everything we don’t individually want.

  As these defining characteristics apply to me you can notice when you take a good look at all my comments. I am a firm believer in what I would believe as the real qualities and aspects of life. I find particular comfort in the things I can see and feel, or anything I can perceive in some capacity. Maybe I’m a control freak and maybe what I’m doing doesn’t really make sense in the long time. But as of right now and in this particular moment of my life it fits me best to adhere to this. My survival right now requires that I embrace who I am. I think plurk reaffirms this for all of us. It proves that if we stick to who we are we can still try to embrace other styles at he same time. We are who we are. Our perspective and our genetics bind us, and in this regard we mostly become more of what we already are.

The Small

The relevance of the small in our world is quite simply determined largely by perspective. I believe that in some aspects we can say that the word nano is a perspective. Nano demands that we give the small an equal chance at importance and demands that the building blocks are acknowledged as their own entire entities. It challenges the conception of where these building blocks really begin or end.

  Interestingly enough I really do believe humans in general exist on a nano level. Examine the universe on a larger level and our galaxy can become a part of the nano. What makes this conversation so difficult is that it doesn’t really allow for anything to be categorized. And since nothing can be categorized doesn’t that make everything fall in the same category? Does everything deserve to be considered in the nano since we can’t define the end and beginning of perspective? I’m just toying with an idea here.

  Within the realm of a classroom I see it working like this. There are some obvious beginning points such as the different opinions, the different life stories, or the different ways everyone presents himself or herself. Or a more interesting place to start is the things we don’t share. The secrets we never come to reveal or the thoughts we have about each other that go unsaid. This is an interesting part of the nano because it goes unobserved because of the inability to observe it. But we can agree it all contributes equally. These things I have mentioned that go without being discussed are the catalysts of all the things we say. I believe within the classroom perspective they exist on the nano level of ideas. Ideas we don’t entertain with others and the information we choose not to share contribute more than we can really give credit. If we were to write down every thought we had what percent would we share? Then from that percentage I would be interested to see what preceded the other.

  The small really isn’t all that small on a conceptual level. If the entire conceptual building is nothing without its blocks than the small isn’t really all that small in meaning and quality. The more we conversed in class the more I begin to feel that. I almost at one point didn’t really even want to say anything because I was getting lost in translation. It was hard for me to say anything because I began to feel that everything was apart of the small or that everything was equally small. Which at that point it almost becomes hard to share when you realize that anything you say is equally relevant; or equally irrelevant.

  This is where the discussion gets even more interesting. The small challenges our thinking of chronological importance. The hierarchy way of thinking is either affirmed or negated by the small depending on your mood. To me it seems that it is our natural genetic disposition to adhere to a hierarchy, and the small, in the context of our class nanotexts, really became to appear not all that small. The power of ten video was another media that never really left my mind on this subject. Essentially you can go infinitely small and infinitely big. Then where is the beginning and where is the end?

  This question is very revealing of what we as humans designate important, relevant, and meaningful. The way in which we do this is much like the camera that slowly backed in and out of the frames. However we are born into a certain frame that our society, parents and genetics predispose us to view. The small and the large are largely designated in our younger years and as we get older it becomes apparent that we have control over the focus of the lens.

  The discussion of the small in our class has shown me more than anything to make my life my own. That is, I must decide on my own what’s really going to be small, what’s going to be important, and what is going to be of meaning. It becomes clear that no one really has the answers and that no lens is the right lens.

  The butterfly effect in my last blog post also comes to mind. The small subtle differences in where the marble is placed, vastly affect where it ends up. This is the epitome of the definition of small becoming ambiguous and of the small completely turning the tables on us. Where does it all begin and where does it all end? It seems we can’t really reach a consensus. In the end the small and our discussion of it in Nanotexts has proven that it’s all up to the individual.

Animal and Machines 

  This topic has the most appeal to me as a writer. The question, what is the difference between animals and machines, if any, is full of debate.

 Well for one humans have designed machines. Somewhere in our brain there came an idea to bind metal together with electrical currents. I argue that machines came about through the desire for an industrious tool for mankind. Machines are the manifestation of several human desires. Perhaps they manifest our desire to make work easier. Perhaps they manifest our desire for creation. Perhaps they embody our desire for control. And maybe they are all of these things. But I find it hard to say they are of they same class and distinction.

  The issue for me arrives when we discuss programming. A machine can be programmed at the beginning of its creation to perform a certain task. A human is born with a program, essentially genes, but innumerable outside sources affect what task it performs. The way in which programming occurs is vastly different as well. The machine is programmed at a hardware level. Meaning that machine can be stopped at any moment and reprogrammed. It doesn’t have any will. It doesn’t have any desire or say in it’s programming. In this light the machine becomes just a piece of a human.

  A human is programmed steadily and over time. And the human has some say, to a degree, in what is programmed. It almost is as if humans program themselves. A human is programmed through communicative means. These communicative means shed light on how programming a human requires persuasion. At the essence of things a human needs to be reassured that it has control in its program while a machine either doesn’t know any better or this portion of thought is simply void.

  Can a machine actively create? I think no. I believe that this is also a defining difference. The machine has boundaries to captivate or give meaning to experience. What makes the Terminator movies so interesting to watch is how this line is crossed by the robots when they begin to exert their own will. If will can one day be programmed it seems that this would enable robots to be closer in the discussion binding humans and machines. Will is synonymous with survival and machines don’t have this need at their core.

  One similarity between machines and animals/humans that allows me to believe will can and one day be programmed is the belief that our own programs adhere to code. The programs inside us that drive our own desires and emotions adhere to a code. It is possible on some level to interpret everything we are and do in numbers. This makes it possible to see a pattern, something discernable and something that can be rewritten. Humans, masters at replication will undoubtedly discover a way of inscribing this to a machines program.