Questions of Identity on Social Networks Like Gather

I really need to return to this idea, and post here. I am still working on these ideas of visualizing networks and identity as it relates to a work project for establishing probabilities of plots in assymetric war-fare, and then assigning PML (probable maximum loss) and timelines to those plots. If I could write more, I would.

My idea for you is to use the model of theatre, and giving a performance, as a starting point. The Elizabethan world was an amazing place of socially constructed being, and the Globe Theatre was at its center. Shakespeare, Marlowe, and other lesser playwrights like The Duchess of Malfi's author all knew how social being had to be developed as character within action (with a certain space time unity occurng, not as stringently as in Louis XIV's court under Moliere later, but still). I'm a smart person data mining you, but I don't need to use your metaphors, even if they work better on a flowchart than mine, because mine have been tested on the stage, where the audience can throw tomatoes but usually doesn't.
I appreciate immensely the public persona you've constructed, but I also know it's done for an elite group that you projected that simply hasn't congregated here yet.....you are a pathfinder, Will, showing the way whiled still looking, like Walker Percy in Lost In The Cosmos, for somebody to show you semiotically who the fuck you are. "The only sign in the universe we can't read is ourselves."

Your right.
Again.
Have you every noticed that "accessible" is a term of praise given to authors in book reviews conferring a 'safeness,' or a "not-otherness," just as I was reading that for too many years after Godel completed his Incompleteness theorems, people tried to attach-connect them to postmodernism - so they can SUCK-IT-IN, make it understandable, and therefore, perhaps, controllable.
An interesting thought, actually, a Foucault -like Panopticism of literature, without walls, yet open, watching to enforce discipline. Humphh.
Perhaps that will go no-where.

All I know is, my friend, the two most thoughful, metaphysically rendered pieces I've posted on this site, CRUISE MISSILE IN THE PANOPTICON and BLADE SONGS TO DANNY PEARL, have no readers. People stop by, go, what the fuck is he doing on so many levels, get scared or intimidated, and balk at a comment. THank God Laura tries to get me, she's not only sexy but a samaritan. By the way, you'll appreciate the palimpsest dialogue I''ve created now with your Panopticism comment, the Panopticon drawing accompanying my poem, its relationship to the Piranesi painting of impossible prisons that it deconstructs as the following image, which ties back to Coleridge describing the Piranesi to De Quincey when they were trying to evoke for readers what opium does to stimulate their imaginations, and the sorts of archetypal images that arise in the mind i.e. spiralling infinite prisons, the perfect rebus for the inscribed Self that cannot get out of its own dungeon.
But you are about the only reader on gather.com who will fully 'get' on some level my infernal literary depth figure, and when I wrote that poem I envisioned Nabokovs lining up to shake my hand and offer me a '10' that actually meant something akin to wow! you can fucking write, and think.....

I am a shit, my friend. I am not going to post anymore until I read all your stuff.

And I owe you a big apology for not having discovered you sooner. Alas, you don't put 'poetry' in your tags enough, and that is my crafted public persona on this site.
However, in a sense I'm glad it worked out this way, especially after I made my decision to only read one person at a time, and not try to blip around gather.com like some crazed bug. I am no longer addicted to this blog--and my addiction only lasted a couple of weeks.
Anyhow, today has been a watershed for me, because I finally found, as Baudelaire said in Paris Spleen, mon frere.
I can write difficult poems again, thank god, for somebody besides our beauteous, luscious Laura.

"Will some smart person at Gather (sit DOWN Marstall!), data-mine my interactions, posts, comments, views, invites within the context of my projected persona and be able to tell me who the F**K I really am?"

You are a guy who apparently only exists in black and white, but eats black and white pasta, or something like it. You are strangely flat and backlit, consisting of lots of letters strung into something resembling words (many of them big) and language, plus a very small image. Only the true seer can know that deep down, you are entirely composed of ones and zeroes.

At least, this is what I get from your presence on Gather, compelling and enticing though it is.

Did you take the blue pill or the red pill before writing this article? ;)

"Remember, all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more."

Red Pill -- all the way, until the wheels come off -- or I become unhinged.

Hope you didn't think my snarky answer was meant as an insult. I was just reacting to what I see on the screen. Sometimes it seems strange to be trying to communicate with a person via a screen. Actually, your article was so interesting that I was forced to make wise remarks. You're not made of ones and zeroes, are you?

I got it!

This makes me wonder about the process of information discovery. Can forging an identity on a system or within a community like Gather lead to a user finding something that they didn't know that they were looking for? Is it possible to program for not just intuition, but for the proverbial "happy accident"...?

Deep.

I do stumble upon Happy Accidents once in a while, surfing through keywords tags (this was one of the reasons we went with tags on Gather), surfing through connections - connections also does this. I have also found interesting things by going to the homepage of wikipedia, which invariably serves up something new and interesting.

Speaking of which - how did you end up on this article I wrote? Its old, and very much viewed, and rather obscure, so I wonder what path you took to get here.