Final - Part 3 - Limits

Topic: Limits

I always thought that the more you wrote in an essay the more impressive it was. What were 2 pages compared to 7? If you could say something in more words it could only strengthen the paper. The more details the better. These were the impressions I got growing up anyways. That’s what kids learn in elementary school, that’s what teens learn in high school. The limits put on me in college have begun to alter those beliefs ingrained into me from childhood though.

With language as much can be said in one word as can be said in a sentence. I can greet a person with “Hey Dr Nanhole, what’s up?” or I can say exactly the same thing by instead saying the monosyllable, “Hey.” Nothing is lost with the shortening, besides the common pleasantries. Who needs those among friends though? By using plurk I learned to cut out what was unnecessary from my posts or use shorthand so as to fit everything within the 140 character parameters. A harder task then it first appears. What I wonder most about language now is how in speech we often use many words for a small meaning. Let us return to the previously mentioned greetings. In the longer one I first acknowledged The Prich’s presence and then asked how he was, all that had nothing to do with what I want from Professor 9 though. I asked how he was, but what I really meant was “Tell me how you are so I can tell you how I am.” If I had only said “hey” as an opener then it probably would have been 'that one' who first asked me “what’s up?” and then I would have skipped a whole step in reaching my goal. The limits put on by plurk actually serve to focus a conversation and remove the fluff. The important stuff is under all the layers anyways right? I was very amused by what everything boiled down to when stripped of its length. I'm pretty confident that CalvinLawrence was able to sum it up quite nicely in a plurk of his, “the most popular plurks are, things people did today "mmm waffles", inspirational quotes, and cute pictures - this is what we are”(3/2/09). I’t's so very entertaining to find out that our favorite parts of the day to share with each other are the small parts. In fact, the first plurk I made was about how I’d made bacon or some other food.

Maybe it’s because the small is that which we most want recognition for. Eating, sleeping, shelter from the elements; all of these are basic needs and yet when lacking or in the act of fulfilling one we send it out into the plurk universe to line up beside other people’s posts of the same nature. Language and plurk serve as a way to keep a record of mine and my classmate’s fulfillment of our must basic needs. Once taken care of we can then move on to fulfill our companionship or intellectual needs. We can work on these only until we are again distracted by wants of the bathroom and more food. A cycle that has us moving towards the top where thought resides and dropping down when basic needs make themselves known again.

I’d like to think that I am more confident in my writing now that I can appreciate the value of not stretching for length, quality not quantity as they say. There is much more effort put into downsizing a piece of work then making it larger. At what point have you taken too much and damaged context and understanding? Where is the line between simplest form and loss of intended meaning? These are much more complicated questions then trying to decide where you can add in another sentence that basically says the same as the one before it, just rearranged in a new way.

I've also learned new ways to think about writing. In our plurks we experimented with using song titles as sentences. Doing this was interesting because we were taking a different medium, songs, and making them into language. It reminds me of how we took mundane thoughts and threw them into plurk to create a master collection of all those thoughts. A master collection that is read in a different way then one would read a book. New plurks are influenced by previous ones, old plurks can continue to extend with the attention of present responses. Plurk became a growing thing that the class nourished and still nourishes. A journal of our experience this quarter that can only be understood by those who have learned the language we inadvertently constructed. This was proven obvious by those few people outside the class that left confused comments about many of our plurks that they didn't understand. Didn't understand becuase they weren't there during class and hadn't read the texts we had, all of which contributed to the language that was our collaborative plurk.