Well, I am enjoying myself collecting things for my lifestream, though my collecting is still very experimental as I am not sure a) what to collect or b) why I am collecting (other than because it says I should in the handbook).  However the pleasure of collecting has already superseded the desire for obedience, so I feel like I am amassing baubles and trinkets.  Which made me think of magpies “oh shiney” and then bower birds:

Bower birds and magpies have good reasons for their obsessive collection of pretty things – they do it to attract a mate.  Is that our reason?  Are we just trying to attract attention?  I suspect this is the main reason for almost everything we do online (apart from education of course).

When I am not thinking of things all e-learning I can sometimes be found thinking of things artistic.  The two sides merged for a moment today when I realised that I was pouting a little over the drab look of my Lifestream.  Yes, I have (for the moment) picked the plainest theme.  But that was because I wanted my content to be highlighted.  The problem is the nature of the beast means that my stream is composed of lines of links, tiny quotes and teeny thumbnail images.  I had this sudden desire to be able to strew my lifestream with fairy wings, sunflowers, buttons and paisely.

Where did this urge come from?

Well I think the subconscious association for me is the very twee and decidedly girly world of digital scrapbooking – which according to wikipedia shares a common ancestor with lifestreaming the commonplace book.

There is nothing scholarly or dystopian about scrapbooking.  The only terrifying future vision imaginable in the world of cute collections, baby books and recipes is the realm of the Stepford Wife.  Ok that is pretty scary, but the worst thing that could happen in this world is  dinner is late because Ms Scrapbooker has become so absorbed in editing her images in Photoshop CS3 she lost track of the time.

Scrapbooking, however, develops the idea of my last post (honest) in the sense of a collection of moments or ephemera.  The fact that we can delete the unsightly and hunt out the appealing means we aren’t offering a glimpse of our reality, but rather a snapshot of our idealised selves.  The good student (in our context), or possibly the doting mother (in a scrapbook world).

Anyway, for anyone who is like me longing for a prettier (if slightly tackier) world, some links:

blush butter

scrapbook flair

raspberryroad designs

I thought I would snag that quote first. It is one of the first thing that came to mind when I looked at my newly flowing lifestream.  Actually the real quote  (by Heraclitus 540 BC – 480BC) is:

“You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.”

Except of course with a lifestream, you can, which makes me feel like we are going against nature.  Tweets and Facebook status updates are, surely, ephemera.  I feel like the process of lifestreaming is (possibly – after all I have only been doing it for one day) clinging to something that shouldn’t be clung to.

I should insert here that I am seriously into Eastern belief systems so, as far as I am concerned, living in the moment and letting go of the past is where it is at.

I don’t like stockpiling stuff, that is my husband’s department (both of them now I think about it – my first husband saved the cinema tickets from every film we went to see).  Once I decided I didn’t want to be one of life’s hoarders I threw away a suitcase of letters (remember those? they were cool… came in envelopes with stamps and postmarks and everything).  I had years’ worth of letters from friends,  love letters from… well that is none of your business who from, plus every letter my dad sent me while I was at university.  Even now dad is gone I don’t have a moment’s regret for letting them go.  Although I don’t remember what was said those letter filled moments made me, they are me – I am, in pranic form, every letter that has ever been sent to me.  I don’t need the little paper corpses shrouded in envelopes to tell me who I am.

So if letting go is good and clinging is bad, lifestreaming can’t possibly be healthy as an end in itself.  So why do it?

Well, I am willing to keep an open mind, and I am sure we will all come up with a ton of reasons  (other than to prove to our tutors that we aren’t just sitting around browsing Lolcats) and I admit I am really excited to be at the beginning of a new e-learning journey, as long as I am able to let it all go at the end of it.