Lifestream 4
While discussing uncanny pedagogies, Bayne (2010) lists Lifestream as an example of something that captures the spectrality of one’s digital existence. What is this digital existence? Hook (2005 in Bayne, 2010) deconstructs it as a ‘disembodied presence’ and, what is more interesting, an ‘embodied absence’. Although the latter refers to the presence of our representation online while we go offline it is fascinating to see how this absent presence, instead of being static and fixed, is dynamic and subject to constant activity
The lifestream by being an example of a digital text, that is volatile, fragmented, distributable and doubtful in terms of its authorship (Bayne 2010) illustrates this dynamism very well, especially in terms of temporal and ontological blurring.
Unable to log on every day, I create discontinuity in the stream. However, the software sometimes fills in those gaps by tampering with the time stamp of a given feed. So although physically offline one day, it looks like I am present. Would that be an example of disembodied presence, a very convoluted example due to the feed being time-stamped backwards!? This happens because the software seems to be taking into account the date the online resource was posted, not when I favourited it. So to make things even stranger my absence/presence has been embodied by somebody else’s online activity.
Immediate questions arise as to the authorship. Who is creating this stream? How can you-not-being-there be assessed ? Uncanny indeed!