Summary Week 11

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.