Note: This was originally written as a reaction to a discussion in my CW141 – Creative Nonfiction 2 class last year, under Ma’am Chingbee Cruz.
“At once backward-looking and navel examining, these pieces lack Sturm und Drang, a consensus seems to have grown the the genre should be…a bit sedate.” – Cristina Nehring
In this age of the one-hundred-and-forty character microblog, this is slowly becoming the norm. Especially in Plurk. This is not to say that Plurk—once described as the water cooler area to Twitter’s workplace—is entirely worthless. It’s just after a thousand or more dancing bananas and a full hundred Karma, I sometimes feel that plurking just loses its meaning. And all because of the same system that made it so fun in the first place: Karma.
You see, Karma (as evidenced by the plurktrends graph) gets updated every 4 hours. Since you need more Karma to unlock more emotes and dancing bananas, people end up plurking useless plurks just to bump up their Karma. Some even ask for Karma boosts, but at least that’s a straightforward attempt to boost Karma—I’d rather have that than plurks pretending to be interesting.
So how is a plurk useless? When it fails to generate enough responses that would go past hi, hello, and some emotes—though I think the (taser) and/or dancing banana emote would be exceptions, since these are usually used when the plurker has dug his own grave and no extra emphasis would be needed. Classic examples would be: [name] is going to have lunch, [name] is leaving, [name] has just arrived, etc.
At first, these seemed to be pretty harmless; but after a few weeks of only posting that cycle of plurks and my timeline getting filled with that (say, fifty of the hundred Unread Responses/New Plurks), it somehow leads me to think that some people just don’t have enough of a life to post on Plurk. Or just too busy to plurk something better and more creative. Or even yet, they’re secret agents so they can’t reveal too much about what they’re currently doing or Luneta would explode, sending Rizal’s statue flying like a giant projectile aimed at Malacanang.
These are precisely what Nehring describes as “navel-examining” – no one, after all, would really care about your navel except you; and unless there’s something that would actually stir any real interest, why post it?
And I know I’m going to be flamed terribly for that statement there, but maybe that’s just what been missing on Plurk lately (though I sometimes wish that secret agent thing was just true). That’s what made me love Plurk when it was just starting out—it was just weird, wacky and insightful enough because of the debates that it used to have, ranging from morality to just plain soup—and that’s I want (at least my side of) Plurk to have back.
I don’t want this case to happen again: somebody—or whatever that was, since I subscribe to Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” adage most of the time—added me as a friend, and when I checked the plurk profile, the timeline was just filled with plurks containing just random keystrokes. How random? Like this: fdsaaasdaasdasdaaaa, then repeat several times over. If that was on some online game, it’d prolly be branded as a bot running on some preset command to plurk at this preset time. So I just clicked the “Add as Fan” button, blocked that, and went on with my not-so-happy life (since I can’t do what I do in the game: kill the bot and leave it dead in some random field).
So I hope that after this three-thousand plus character rant, something will change. Or not, and hope that Ashton Kutcher or somebody as popular would make a campaign on Plurk (since there’s already something like a Plurk Etiquette campaign a few weeks back). And that’s something that would surely kick Twitter’s ass as well.
