The following is a continuation of the connections between new media network interaction and Deleuze & Guattari's concepts in A Thousand Plateaus. That said, while it doesn't directly mention many other topics bouncing around online communities, parts can certainly be extended to conversations on attention (see Alex Barnett and Attention Trust for this) and the personal use of Web 2.0 applications. Also Adam Marsh at EconoMeta addresses a similar issue from an entirely different, yet very interesting, standpoint.
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When interactiing in developing online media (anything from del.icio.us, to OkCupid, to MySpace) we are leaving traces of our identity, of our personality perhaps more accurately, everywhere we go, on everything with which we interact. This is becoming especially true in Web 2.0, and folksonomy-based applications where the process of interaction fundamentally alters the function and output of the interactive system. To speak in specifics, look at your Web-traces. If you're like me, you'll have a blog or two on which you have posted an array of material; you'll have several social network site profiles, one for each site, Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc; you'll have Last.FM and Pandora accounts, and so on. At each of these arenas you leave traces of your/a personality. There are the lists of reccomended music, your lists of friends, and any amount of data that we leave behind either intentionally or not through the process of interaction.

In aggregate these traces are our projected identity. It may be the combination of several pseudonymous sets of interaction, it may be bare-bones factual, but this is the sum identity that exists as a result of our movements through and interaction with these applications. The projected identity is inherently multiple. It is a multiplicity. It draws from the many interactions, personalities we take on. David Lat's projected identity draws as much from his former role as "Article III Groupie" as it does from his personal list on 43 Things (if he should have one). Thus the projected identity is made up not only from the different avenues through which we project but also the full spectrum of what we project. This is our own "wolf pack" as D&G would put it, our own swarm. And as much as we lead to this multiplicity, this multiplicity leads to us.

But the projected idenity is not only multiple it is also deterritorialized. Just as the hand and face are the deterritorialized body and the landscape a deterritorialized world, the projected identity is a deterritorialized identity. But like the face it is a more intense deterritorialization than something like the hand because it does so on levels beyond simply movement and boundary and into signification and interaction. We operate through the projected identity, continually adding more tendrils, more avenues as we go along keeping the process of deterritorialization moving as well as repeatedly confirming the multiplicity.

Yet as D&G write, "one never deterritorializes alone; there are always at least two terms, hand-use object, mouth-breast, face-landscape." So what is the reterritorializing pair for the projected identity? It would seem that the natural pairing for this is the database as the deterritorialized archive. The database, the list of the traces that make up the individual tendrils of our projected identities, is in a very literal sense, a deterritorialization of the physical, panoptic archive. The relationship between projected identity and database is much like that between hand and tool (use object). The tool exists for the hand, the hand exists for tools, just as the projected identity exists to be in a database (otherwise funcitonality of the specific applications would be lost) and the database exists to store projected identities. We now have our pair, the projected identity reterritorializes on the database.

To draw back a bit from the linguistic mire through which D&G often lead those who follow, the important points to take away from applying their analytical process to new media network interaction are 1) the multiplicity of a projected identity and 2) that this projected identity is deterritorialized from individual personality/identity and reterritorialized on the database. Just as there are the face-landscape, hand-tool systems, there is a projected identity-database system of which we must remain aware. The obvious unwanted social implications extend to surveillance and impersonation, but culturally, we are creating selves outside ourselves. Many-tendriled projections.