I was attracted to the idea of a lifestream as an adaptation of the 17th century practice of ‘commonplacing’ but I had no idea how a digital version of this would work in practice. Before I started the MSc, my digital presence was very limited. Since starting the MSc, I started to use Delicious as a tool as well as a wiki for collaborative writing. To a much lesser extent I was using Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter. My perception was that I was not very digitally engaged.

In my second week summary, I had blogged that I was still grappling with what the stream could technically capture and that I felt that it could not capture my process when I was reading course material. However, reviewing my lifestream, I feel it gives a good account of my engagement with the course. At the time it seemed a bit chaotic but reviewing it I can see a logical account. I am surprised how even my tweets seem coherent. Perhaps it is just the process that appears chaotic – when you are in the middle of collecting a range of information – but reviewing it I can see my progress. The weekly summaries were a good discipline to make me reflect weekly on my stream but I think they are ‘in the moment’ of the process. Going over the last 12 weeks of my stream is giving me another perspective. Maybe over time the chaos coalesces into an archive – a curation as Jen called it.

I learned to use the lifestream to:

Process my reading

I had realised early on that I could use Tumblr to capture my reading, but while I created an account in the first week, I did not have the time to figure out how it works until Week 5 when I added it to my feed. I stopped mindmapping the articles I was reading and used Tumblr as a tool to reflect on key quotes. I would right click on the links in the lifestream to open them up in a new tab (because of technical problems in getting the content into the feed). I could then review them and write up my thoughts in my blog albeit in a different format.

Collect information and data

During the virtual ethnography I started to use the lifestream as a data collection tool – holding the videos and other information that would make up my ethnography. I copied selected comments from the videos onto Tumblr. It proved an effective tool to construct the ethnography.

I had blogged that while the lifestream aggregates the disparate information we collect as we traverse the digital world, it is our minds that make sense of it: The ‘machine’ provides no interpretation or sensemaking of the material it aggregates. Our human mind makes the connections and provides the context for why this information was noted in the first place (see blog relating Giorgi’s phenomenological approach and the lifestream).

Link to my lifestream.