Lifestreaming research overview

April 16 2010, 10:07am

What is lifestreaming? Lifestreaming is the act of documenting and sharing your life online. A lifestream website collects all of the things you publish (e. g., photos, tweets, videos, or blog posts) and displays them in reverse-chronological order. (Here is a gallery of example lifestream websites.) Who invented lifestreaming?

Lifestreaming was first envisioned to be a true electronic memory. Computer scientists Eric Freeman and David Gelernter founded the concept of Lifestreams as a “network-centric replacement for the desktop metaphor” currently in place on computer operating systems. Lifestreams as a software architecture was meant to organize your digital life in a time-ordered stream of documents. Was there lifestreaming before computers? A page from Davinci's journals Marketer Steve Rubel likes “to think of a lifestream as today’s digital equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. [...] da Vinci recorded notes, drawings, questions and more in his notebooks. Some of these were quite mundane (grocery lists and doodles), others were not. But the body of work was over time, a view of a one individual’s mind.”

Samuel Pepys was a 17th century diarist living in London, who can also be called a lifestreamer. Beginning on January 1, 1660, Pepys kept a diary in which he recorded his daily life for 10 years. He wrote extensively about relationships with women, friends, business matters, emotions, trivial concerns and his difficult marriage. His account of his personal life as well as national events in the 1660s is invaluable to historians. Portrait of Bob Graham with notebook Since 1977, Senator Bob Graham has been tracking minute details of his life in small notebooks, including weight, location, attire, meeting notes and social interactions. Recently, there was a political controversy over whether House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been briefed in detail about torture of the 9-11 terror attack suspects. The CIA claimed Pelosi had been briefed, but Pelosi denies having been briefed. It turns out that Senator Graham was also supposed to have been briefed on the torture, but Graham’s records show that the CIA’s were inaccurate. Of the four briefings the CIA claimed occurred, only one was documented in Graham’s notebooks. Graham’s notebooks proved to be more credible than an organization whose very reason for existence is information collection, communication and recording. What does lifestreaming look like today? The difference between da Vinci, Pepys, and Senator Graham and lifestreamers today is that lifestreaming is a public activity done online.

Part of lifestreaming is self-tracking. Kevin Kelly’s blog The Quanitified Self explores the benefits of self-tracking with the aid of computers. A few things computers make easier for us are financial budgeting, counting calories, tracking physical activity, calculating carbon footprint, and monitoring sleep cycles. By sharing and measuring activities online, we can begin to identify patterns in our behavior.

Lifestreaming is used for self-tracking and as an organizational tool. But it was Julia Allison who introduced me to the concept of a lifestream as performance and reputation. Allison broadcasts her life via her website, Nonsociety, to entertain and gain a media reputation. Allison uses lifestreaming to control her personal brand and public persona. Other lifestreamers include Apollo Lemmon, Gala Darling, Katelyn Berwanger, Natalie Strobach, and Kelly Cree. Recent news in lifestreaming is covered at Lifestreamblog.com. How does lifestreaming work? My workflow:

Posting to a lifestream means sending your updates both to your social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and to your lifestream website. Services like Posterous let you send your updates to an email address, which then forwards the message to your social networks and website, making the posting process more efficient. A lifestream generally consists of two types of posts–short form experience streaming and long form self-reflection. Experience streaming tends to happen on mobile devices, while longer self-reflective posts tend to be done via computer. Another example workflow (via Benjamin Karam):

My research In my research I test the potential of lifestreaming as a life design methodology. By publicly documenting my life at jessicamullenslifestream.com, can I become more accountable for my decisions, strengthen my reputation, break bad habits, and live my passions? Among the things I monitor at my site are diet, exercise, finances, lifestream design work, and spirituality. Combined with support from my social network, can this public self-evaluation help me recognize and eradicate patterns and social structures that negatively impact my life? My lifestreaming methodology 1. I document my daily activities to work towards my goals, even when I fail to meet them. 2. I gauge my health & resources with online tools. 3. I share my experiences with my social network for feedback and accountability and help others where I can. 4. I slowly build a reputation based on the type and quality of updates I make. 5. I locate patterns & systems holding me back & publicly eliminate them from my life. I attempt to monetize what I learn with premium lifestream content subscriptions.

I got the idea of monetizing a lifestream from author Tim Ferriss–a pioneering “lifestyle designer” who provides instructions on creating an online business that can sustain itself. Ferriss believes in living the life you want now, instead of waiting for retirement. He suggests doing this by selling digital information products to create automated income. Ferriss led me to combine financial interests with lifestreaming interests, resulting in the implementation of “premium content” in a lifestream, where people pay to subscribe to certain types of lifestream content. What I learned yellow posts are food related My main lifestream focus is food! I am happy with the result–I hope to raise awareness about the importance of healthy eating. Eating is something we all do multiple times a day, and it affects every part of our lives, from our health to how we feel about ourselves. Why should we care about lifestreaming?

Clay Shirky argues that gin was the critical technology of the industrial revolution. The transition from rural to urban society was so jarring that without gin as a social lubricant, society might have gone awry with so many people living so closely together. Once society had come off their “collective bender”, institutions as we know them today, like public schools and libraries, began to emerge to take advantage of this new social configuration. Then in the 20th century, the assembly line and mass production and the 9-5 day job gave people something they didn’t have before: free time. To deal with this “cognitive surplus”, the sitcom was born and we spent 50 years watching TV. Now we are coming off our collective TV bender and taking advantage of all that free time with the Internet. Shirky’s view is that every bit of participation or creation via the Internet is magnitudes more productive to society than spending our free time watching TV.

Publishing information about our lives and the world we live in to the Internet is a collective use of our cognitive surplus, and it is making machines smarter. Right now, web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. An in-progress development for the World Wide Web, the Semantic Web is a technology for enabling computers to understand content, links and exchanges between people and computers. The Semantic Web may automate tedious tasks of trade and bureaucracy and create intelligent agents to assist our daily lives.

Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil believes increased participation in media creation and consumption as well as technological advancement are swiftly leading us towards the technological singularity, meaning we build machines smarter than ourselves and enable humanity to transcend its biological limitations. Lifestreaming and the Semantic Web may be stepping stones to the singularity, by providing machines with more digital data about the world we live in. I’d like you to imagine what the world would look like if everyone was a lifestreamer. If we could experience the lives and unique perspectives of every person in the world, what understanding might we gain? Lifestreaming and learning I’m most interested in how lifestreaming can be used for learning. My dream is to be an Internet professor of Lifestreaming! These are ways I see lifestreaming helping students:

help from faculty posting in public gives motivation failure documentation helps others doing similar work searchable archive of work and creation of a learning portfolio

A course at the University of Edinburgh required students to maintain a lifestream for 12 weeks, with promising results. Questions? What are your perceptions of lifestreaming? What confuses you or puts you off about it? What is interesting about lifestreaming? How can lifestreaming be useful to learning? What are the barriers to introducing lifestreaming in school?