An interesting post from Jen and Sian on the lifestream earlier this week but I’m not sure I accept either of the two metaphors used.
I tend to view curating as a purposeful assemblage of contextualised artefacts for an audience. Use of the Eduspaces (Elgg) presentation tool for collating blog posts for IDEL a year or so back seemed a better example of curatorial activity (retrospective sense making, selection and organisation).
As for automatic writing, I still see it as a surrealist experiment with accessing/making public the unconscious – ça parle (the id speaks) . However quickly composed, I don’t think anyone’s Twitter feeds constitute écriture automatique in the sense that Breton, Man Ray and assorted misogynist 30s pranksters would understand it.
So, how do I see the lifestream? More mixed metaphors coming up as I think we engage with the digital in laminated or layered ways and we leave a trace or residue of that engagement which is partially visible and can be made more so.
For example, I’ve engaged with the digital as a consumer; in the two weeks of this course I’ve shopped online (the new Lorrie Moore novel and Alekander Hemon stories from Amazon; some Richard Hawley songs and a series of Peep Show from iTunes). I’ve also purchased digital games for my children (FIFA10 for my 10-year old son). I don’t feel like adding them to my lifestream for others to see as I don’t think they add to intellectual debate (or boost my image as hip 40 something!).
I’ve operated within the digital to contact my partner – currently in Chicago – emailing photos of our children who I know she’s missing. I’m going to upload some videos of them to YouTube later and email or txt her the link. Phone calls are expensive but media-rich content uploaded and accessed online costs nothing (well nearly). I see technology as helping be ‘more human’, in this case, going soe way to meet the emotional need for connection with absent loved ones (hence my irritation with Social Network for 2’s platitudes).
Another layer of my digital engagement is as an HE professional, I’ve sent emails, collaborated on Google docs, advised colleagues on various technologies – including Twitter. Part of my professional interaction with peers is conducted online – often using my @anthonymcneill Twitter account or other services like Cloudworks. I’ve been a bit of a consumer here too, buying iPod Touches and Twitter apps for colleagues as part of my LearnHigher Twitter project.
Finally. I’ve been engaging with the digital – as theme and as platform – as a postgraduate student on this course; using WordPress to blog, a second Twitter account (@digitialanthony) to tweet. These two technologies have provided the bulk of my lifestream to date but I think this will change as the course moves to consider the multimodal.
[...] Week 2 began with one of my early reflections on visuality with a blog post on the polysemous nature of the visual image. I enjoyed writing it – and name checking artists I enjoy – and the comments of Sian and fellow students. This post, like the next one, We’re (culture) jammin‘, was written in response to another student’s reflection. That week I took a rare foray into the multimodal – uploading a short film made on my iPhone to YouTube. Finally, I had another go at a film review – Girlfriend in a coma. At the end of week 2 I did a rare and beautiful thing and wrote one of my few of-the-moment summaries of my lifestream (http://digitalculture-ed.net/tonym/2009/10/04/reflections-on-my-lifestream/) [...]
[...] I did a rare and beautiful thing and wrote one of my few of-the-moment summaries of my lifestream (http://digitalculture-ed.net/tonym/2009/10/04/reflections-on-my-lifestream/) which has some comments on the lifestream I’d still stand [...]