I was watching a TV programme about Picasso and I was confronted with cubism. I hadn’t really thought about it before – something deconstructed, fragmented and then put back together in a new way. Sounds a bit post-human to me, but I could be 
wrong.
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Please don’t let me know if there are any typos!!!! S This is an essay that was written for the digital cultures module.
I did not know how to encapsulate all I wanted to say about the lifestream in the final post of 500 words. So I thought I would write some: Tips for Lifestreamers 1, Be aware of how your audiences can affect you. This is a public blog, so you are not only writing for an academic community, but also for a myriad of ears and eyes from a variety of backgrounds and with a variety of expectations. I found that envisaging these audiences affected my writing and my choice of links. Sometimes I write in academic formality (see Multiple/Dynamic Identities) and at other times I use the more informal, a more blogging style (see A Cynical Take on my Lifestream). This multivocality may make you feel a little fragmented as a writer/producer of a lifestream. However, you will come to find, when you read Hayles (1999, 2006) that this is part of the posthuman condition, which is in part established with the resources of digital technology, and nothing to be afraid of.
2, Lifestreaming is learning by doing. Although the need to feed the stream (see Summary Week 9) might seem like hoop jumping at times, it has its benefits. Foraging for feeds makes you go out into the internet and interact with that which constitutes what you are studying: digital cultures. Hine (1999) says that by interacting with the online we become familiar with it, and that is what will happen to you.
3, If you are not transliterate (Thomas, et al, 2007) now, you will be. As foraging for feeds entails interaction with the genres and discourses that abound within digital cultures, you will develop your ability to consume and produce digital media artefacts.
4, It’s all in the links. On face value, your lifestream may look like a series of links to a variety of websites and media. With all of these links I was afraid that my lifestream lacked cohesion (see Week 1 Summary). However, this is a characteristic of the genre you are contributing to. The affordances of digital technologies allow such links and although you are producing the lifestream as an academic text, it is still a digital artefact. You are crossing boundaries here – the academic and the blogger. By doing so you can give voice to your multiple subjectivities: you are being posthuman.
5, It is a process: And by looking over your lifestream as a whole, you will see your learning process. I can now see that ideas that I posited in earlier weeks, ssss, have been taken up again in later posts. The lifestream as a whole is the product of learning; however, with its reflective element, it also captures the process of learning (see Week 10 Summary).
6, Comment. The affordance of interaction allows people to interact with your content and when this happens, the lifestream becomes both an artefact of an online community (Bell, 2001; Rheingold, 2000) and a facilitator of this community. Comments remind you that you are learning about digital cultures while you are engaged in digital cultures – forming digital cultures. If the driving force of the internet is links, so is the communication made viable by these links. By commenting you are linking your lifestream with those of others. By commenting and posting you are becoming what you are studying. Summary Week 12
Boundaries. The lifestream makes you think about boundaries between:
All of these boundaries seem to be breached in the lifestream. If as Usher and Edwards (1998) state that postmodern pedagogy was about bounding out, cyborg pedagogy appears to be about holism, about enabling more voices to have a say and in so doing, enabling learners to make, to a certain extent, what they will of the learning ‘opportunities’ offered to them (Usher and Edwards, 1998). However, this begs the question: how to assess lifestreams? I am wondering, just as this (wonderful) artefact is a novel exemplification and process of learning, its assessment methods may be just as novel. Will you assess me on my use of academic discourse? If so, is that fair as I am blogging, and that discourse is far more informal. Will I be penalised for that? Will you assess me for my skills with the digital applications that I have been asked to incorporate into the lifestream – the digital artefact and the ethnography? If so, is that fair as I am still a novice with these tools. Will you be assessing me on account of the number and variety of feeds I have linked into the lifestream? If that is the case, then I am being assessed on hoop-jumping, and my lifestream is not, for me, about just doing what is expected. That has been a tough part of this endeavour for me: making something personal – and the lifestream is my personal artefact as well as an assessment artefact – fit into the bigger picture: the bigger picture being the academic context in which it has been written. Usher and Edwards (1998) cite Featherstone (1995) saying ‘in cyberspace practices, meanings are more readily negotiated by its users’ (p 4). However, is this artefact being assessed in cyberspace and according to the norms of cyberspace? Or is it assessed via the norms of the linear literacies of real life academia? McWilliam and Palmer (1995) cite Ulmer (1998, p 4) ‘to inquire into the future of academic discourse in the age of new technology we must include the possibility of a change not only in technology, but also in the ideology of the subject and forms of institutional practice’. I am not sure what type of institutional practice I am aiming to address – that of the real or the hyperreal. Summary Week 11
I have been concentrating on the essay and on editing the lifestream and these have taken me away from posting on the lifestream itself. The course has drawn to a close, in a way. There is no more reading. There are no more weekly introductions. As a result, it is difficult to know what to post about. Suddenly, the purpose of the lifestream has become diluted. The community in which it resides, the student and tutor group, is busy with other things and as a result I feel as if the lifestream has slipped its anchor and now floats freely and without direction on the cyber sea. If I am to continue this lifestream after this module is over, and I have considered doing just that, I need it to have its own independent purpose. I suppose the lifestream, and myself as a lifestreamer, is coming of age. We now need to work out what our aim is; we have to find an independent raison d’etre. If we can do that, the lifestream may continue. However, in order to do this, there needs to be an audience. Blogging requires a network. Being a cyborg is about connections (Angus, Cook, Evans et al, 2001; Haraway, 2000). Maybe this is why we have been required to look into virtual communities and how they are formed. Outside of the course I am not sure which community I belong to, which community I wish to belong to and which community would accept me as a member. The uncanny. I really enjoyed reading Sian’s text. (It is odd to think that the author of an academic text will be reading what I think about their text. Somehow, posting these thoughts on a blog make them more personal and more relevant than had I inserted them into the discourse of an academic text, and so it seems odd to be referring to Sian’s text here – I am talking to you, Sian!) I wish I had read it at the beginning of the course. This is because it has brought a lot of clarity to the purpose of the lifestream. It was this sentence that helped me see the digital light, ‘Asking students to submit lifestreams as assessed elements of a programme is an attempt provisionally to capture something of the ‘spectrality’ of their digital existences.’ (Bayne, forthcoming, 2010). Reviewing the lifestream, I can see that it does this; it does capture the spectrality of my digital life. There are so many ‘mes’ in this lifestream: my sense of humour is here (Siberia, Cyberia, The Mighty Boosh); my love of J. G. Ballard’s work (Out of the Temporal, Into the Spatial); my interest in mythology (Medb vs Slaine); my feminism (Medb vs Slaine); my enjoyment of cartoons (Role of the Author – Role of the Depictor); the six years I spent living in Japan (Virtual Ethnography) : and all of these facets of me have been incorporated into the academic and reflective discourses that also appear in the lifestream. The affordances of the lifestream enable me to express many more of my identities than would an academic text. It allows me to be posthuman. As a result, this lifestream is not just an assessment artefact; it is a representation of me in many of my spectralities. Without the lifestream, I feel that the certain content would have remained obscure. Haraway (2000); Hayles (1999, 2006) and Badmington (2003) among others would have been difficult to engage with without the experience of interacting with digital cultures via the lifestream. For instance, the idea of digital spectralities brought to life the content on posthumanism and the ‘cyborg’ (Does this course making me a cyborg?), and in return, the content fed my enthusiasm for the lifestream. I am sad it’s over. Reviewing the this lifestream has made me realise how multivocal it is. As Bakh
 Producer and Process
This is a little belated, but nonetheless sincere. The last week of the reading was focused on cyborg pedagogy (Angus, Cook, Evans et al, 2001; McWilliam and Palmer, 1995). Cyborg pedagogy with its three cornerstones of border pedagogy, cyborg ontology and situated knowledge takes us further down the line, across the continuum, of resituating the pseudo-binaries of learning – teaching and learner – teacher positions. What I mean to say is that it seems to be a further weakening of the student as ‘empty vessel’ and teacher as ’sage on the stage’ models. It appears to me that learner centred pedagogies and the affordances of digital technologies, not to mention the influences of post modernism and posthumanism, have come together in cyborg pedagogy. This is because this new pedagogy gives us the tools to further shift our views and to change our outlooks on what teaching and learning are about. It encourages a real focus on the way knowledge can be formed, acquired and reckoned with once it has been made ‘public’. And this is where this course, this learning experience, leaves me. This lifestream is a, I would suggest, a cyborg pedagogic artefact. It is a product of learning, but also a process of learning and acquisition. When I started out, the lifestream seemed something akin to a noticeboard onto which I could pin my ideas (and wait for someone else to pin theirs). However, having gone back into the lifestream and read over my posts, it is clear that rather than being a platform or a product (a display of learning and acquisition) it is the representation of the process of that learning. The lifestream is a textual, audio and visual representation of my own learning process and progress. Once put on ‘display’ there is the responsibility one has to take for one’s views – for the knowledge that one has formed and chosen to publish. The lifestream can form a conversation with a reader, but it is a conversation that remains open over time (as long as it remains hosted online). As a result, something that I may have posted yesterday and which I may stand by today, I may find that I no longer stand by sometime in the future, should a reader take me to task or choose to engage with me on that topic. Having posted, therefore, one has to be ready to either defend or concede and change points should the need arise in the future. The writer has to take responsibility for whatever they believed at any one time once that belief or knowledge, challenge or suggestion, has been unleashed. Week 9 – flaneurs and cyborgs – cyborgs and flaneurs – both transgressors; both providing us with new ways to view the world and to be viewed in it. Both providing new worlds, maybe. I have recently had some comments on my posts- all of which were unashamedly requested. It was nice to get someone in here – always nice to have someone to talk to. The only problem is, they don’t stick around for seconds. It’s a bit of a lonely life being a lifestreamer. You get to talk to yourself quite a lot. A good place to reflect, but possibly not such a great area for socialising. I am coming to equate this lifestream with a tamagotchi – you have to keep feeding it or else it dies. It can be a bit of a drain – it is a bit too ravenous for my liking at the moment in Week 9 when all I want to do is read and think a lot in order to let things settle in to my brain. Having to feed the beast results in me reading and then thinking too little as a result of the time pressures that feeding the stream puts on me. Maybe I am a sea bird who has to regurgitate her food for her hungry chick. I’m not nourishing myself enough - just spewing out semi-digested matter. Maybe I am a sea bird feeding a tamagotchi?
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Another essay written for my masters. It’s about some of the similarities and differences between reading print and reading hypertext.
tin, quoted in this link, says multivocality enables a whole to be formed from not one all-encompassing voice, but from many voices. This is apparent in the lifestream via the links to a variety of texts and media.