Are you living your life or recording it?
In this, the first of two posts on the subject I am going to examine the impact that 'lifestreaming' may be having on some of our experiences. I have been thinking a bit about this in relation to education for some time but a really interesting post on the lifestream blog on the psychology of lifestreaming and the effect that it may be having on your brain/your life has rekindled that interest. In the second post, I will concentrate more on the implications for learning. So what is lifestreaming? From the lifestream blog:
In it’s simplest form it’s a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline. It is only limited by the content and sources that you use to define it.The lifestream blog post basically reviews two interesting stories by CNN on lifestreaming. "Do digital diaries mess up your brain" starts to discuss the impact such services may have on your brain and then looks at some of the psychological implications of it. It seems there are both positive and negatives. The psychological aspects discussed are quite interesting. There is the view that the act of lifestreaming 'takes you out of the here and now'. You stop experiencing life and start recording it. An example is given of people tapped into their mobiles (twittering, messaging, snapping photos etc I guess) as they are at a concert. Many of us have seen this and I am guessing quite a number of us have done something similar. What are we doing here? Are we really experiencing our lives as best we can or have we stepped to one side and are now some sort of observers of them? The CNN article also looks at further implications such as potential benefits from lifestreaming for Alzheimer patients. After all, having a secondary memory to call upon when your primary one is not doing the job sounds quite good! What about your own experiences? Have you forsaken the full benefits of experiencing events etc in your life so that you can record them or tweet about them? If so, do you think stepping out of those experiences so that you could record them or communicate about them, in any way detracted from the experiences themselves? We have probably all been doing this (on occasion) for most of our lives (eg taking photos at parties, on vacation etc) but now we have these ubiquitous technologies that enable us to instantly let the world know what we are experiencing (or at least recording) wherever we are. So 'taking us out of the here and now' is one aspect of what we are doing. We become less engaged and immersed in these experiences as we strive to record them or tell the world (at least what miniscule parts of it could be bothered to listen) about them. What is the impact of that diminished involvement? Are you affecting just yourself or others who are also sharing that experience eg what do your family, friends, colleagues etc think and are you in any way diminishing or altering their experience? What about your behaviour? If you are streaming to the world all sorts of information about you, is that in any way going to affect what you do? You may want to be perceived in a certain way so you might have to adjust your behavior to create that perception. How do you choose what you 'tweet' about. Many social networks and Web 2.0 services allow us to publish and expose parts of our lives. For example, books that we read, goals and ambitions that we have. How we want to be perceived will impact what we express in these networks. Do you try to separate your personal self from your professional self? For example, I know quite a few people who struggle with who they should let into their Facebook network (personal friends, family, work colleagues and other professional contacts). What is the resultant impact on your behaviour - are you living completely as you or as the 'you' that you want to be perceived as? How do you or do you even feel the need to draw the distinction any more between personal and professional? (some do and some don't). The other CNN article that the lifestream blog mentions is 'My week of recording a 'digital memory'. In this article the reporter aims to document every moment of their life for a week. This is right at the extreme end of lifestreaming but is also quite an interesting experiment. On his experience, John D Sutter says:
My issue is that when you set out intentionally to create an e-memory of everything, you end up with too much stuff -- and you miss out on living.One of his tips is not to record everything:
I used an iPhone to record most of the week's activities. The phone's built-in audio recorder proved particularly annoying to my friends. I put the recorder on the table at lunches, flipped it on during car rides and stuck it in friends' faces at bars. In every instance, the recorder changed the dynamics of my conversations. It made them weird. One friend became so nervous about the fact that I had recorded him talking about relationships that he later texted me in a panic -- asking me to delete the file.This affirms my previous concerns about affecting the experiences of others. From his experiences, Sutter also recommends only tracking one thing at a time. Taking on too much is too difficult and left him feeling 'scatterbrained'. The post is an interesting read and he has some nice little insights into the experience. While it is unlikely that any of us are streaming so much of our lives into the digital world (yet), it is still very useful to perhaps sit back and reflect on what we are doing and the impact it may be having on ourselves and others around us (and then blog about it ;))
