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.