I study lifestreaming much through practice. I publicly document my life online–collecting, measuring and reviewing my life data and experiences. I then design lifestream websites to best aggregate, organize and display a lifestream. The following are works that have influenced the trajectory of my research at UT, and that may help explain why I am so passionate about the act of lifestreaming.

A page from Davinci's journals

Leonardo Davinci could be considered a lifestreamer. In his post, Why Lifestream? To Model Leonardo Davinci, Steve Rubel writes, “I like to think of a lifestreaming 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 (in his case a great one).”

Pepys Diary Shorthand

Samuel Pepys was a 17th century diarist living in London, who can also be called a lifestreamer. “On 1 January 1660, Pepys began to keep a diary. He recorded his daily life for almost ten years. The women he pursued, his friends, his dealings, are all laid out. His diary reveals his jealousies, insecurities, trivial concerns, and his fractious relationship with his wife. It is an important account of London in the 1660s. The juxtaposition of his commentary on politics and national events, alongside the very personal, can be seen from the beginning.”

Portrait of Bob Graham with notebook

Senator Bob Graham records minute details of his life in very small notebooks, which Gary Wold details on The Quantified Self blog.

“Graham has been keeping careful handwritten records of his daily life since 1977, when he first ran for governor. He tracks a lot of things: weight, diet, what he wears, his location (down to the room), and of course the names of the people he meets with, his questions and their answers, his promises and theirs.”

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.

Wolf notes that this is interesting because one man’s spiral bound notebooks have more credibility than the “records of an organization whose very reason for existence is to collect information, communicate it to trusted members of government, and keep records of these communications.”

Wolf concludes that “Personal data, kept by a dedicated and interested party, even using yesterday’s technology, will trump large scale collection systems managed by bureaucrats.”

Without computers, documenting one’s life might be considered a project for the meticulously obsessive or eccentric. A far more common hobby, watching televsion, takes up a lot of our time instead. Yet in his lecture Gin, Television and Social Surplus, Clay Shirky argues that the Internet is taking us away from this trend, turning our collective cognitive surplus into digital creativity.

Clay Shirky at the 2008 web 2.0 expo

Shirky argues that gin was the critical technology of the industrial revolution. The transition from rural to urban society was so jarring that 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 emerged. Society spent 50 years watching TV. Now, we are seeing something emerge that takes advantage of all that free time: the Internet. Shirky’s argument is that every bit of participation or creation via the Internet is magnitudes more productive than spending our free time watching TV.

This new form of social expression is changing the very configuration of our society in revolutionary ways, evidenced by the existence of Wikipedia, massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), and collective documentation of obscure events on Flickr.

Shirky’s outlook provides fertile ground for thinking about the collective implications of putting our lives online through lifestreaming.

The Death of Postmodernism, in Philosophy Now

Alan Kirby describes this new era as pseudomodernism, in which participation is necessary in cultural products, instead of one-way TV or radio broadcasting. “Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or the cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product.”

Ray Kurzweil

Increased participation in media creation and consumption as well as technological advancement are leading us towards the technological singularity, according to Ray Kurzweil.

“Technological singularity refers to the hypothesis that technological progress will become extremely fast, and so make the future unpredictable and qualitatively different from today.

Although technological progress has been accelerating, it has been limited by the basic intelligence of the human brain, which has not changed significantly for millennia. However with the increasing power of computers and other technologies, it might soon be possible to build a machine that is fundamentally more intelligent than man.

If such a machine were built, then the machine itself could build a more intelligent machine. If the machine is more intelligent than man, then presumably it would be better at building a more intelligent machine. The more intelligent machine would then be better at building an even more intelligent machine. This process might continue exponentially, with ever more intelligent machines making bigger increments to the intelligence of the next machine.”

Lifestreaming is a technology that may contribute to the technological singularity, by providing machines with more digital data about the world we live in.

Kevin Kelly’s blog The Quanitified Self explores the benefits of self-tracking with the aid of computers. Documenting our daily lives online allows us to measure our progress and share it with others. By measuring activities and tracking measurements online, we can begin to see patterns in our behavior. This self-evaluation may lead to lifestyle change, and better health and decision making.

This quantification of the self is part of lifestreaming. One part self-tracking, one part self-expression, and largely in public, lifestreaming can be considered to be the creation of an e-memory. Over time, small incremental updates add up to reveal patterns and personality.

David Gelernter

Lifestreaming was actually first envisioned to be a true electronic memory. 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.

“Lifestreams is a novel software architecture that was initially developed at Yale University. The goal of Lifestreams is to minimize the time users spend managing their documents and electronic events while increasing their ability to find and make use of this information. To accomplish this we have worked to create a software environment that parallels the way people work with electronic information and simplifies their electronic interactions. Lifestreams is built on a simple storage metaphor — a time-ordered stream of documents combined with several powerful operators — that replaces many conventional computer constructs (such as named files, directories, and explicit storage) and in the process provides a unified framework that subsumes many separate desktop applications to accomplish and handle personal communication, scheduling, and search and retrieval tasks. While our current prototype is tailored to managing personal information, a “lifestream” is also a natural framework for managing enterprise information and web sites; we are just beginning to explore such use.”

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. The self-expression side of technical lifestreaming, Allison uses lifestreaming to control her personal brand and public persona.

Allison’s work demonstrates the importance of publicity in lifestreaming. In addition to maintaining a realtime reputation, a lifestreamer has increased accountability for her actions. Allison’s lifestreaming goal appears to be to secure television spots, which is an interesting use of new technology (the Internet) to gain entrance to older media (television).

With the ability to put our lives online comes the possibility of an automated income. Tim Ferriss is a pioneering “lifestyle designer” who provides instructions on creating an online business that can sustain itself without your intervention. The resulting free time can be used to fulfill more long-term goals. An attempt to subvert the current day job and retirement system, Ferriss argues that we should not defer the lives we want until retirement, but actively pursue them now.

Ferriss discusses selling information products to create automated income. This utilizes the strengths of digital technology as opposed to Allison’s approach to putting her life online to get old media income through television.

Ferriss lead 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. Lifestreaming, to me, is a life support system that combines self-tracking, e-memory, reputation management, and income generation.