LStream Summary Wk1
Foutering. Adding feeds to My Lifestream is foutery. I haven’t used Twitter since IDEL, YouTube was somewhere I went to pass time and Flickr, until fairly recently, was banned in the territorial space I inhabit. So, I spent the week reactivating old accounts, realising that nothing really grows old online. TweetDeck looked as perky as when I left it one and a half years ago. YouTube played hard to get but eventually started sending through the feeds and Flickr proved to be surprisingly absorbing. Instead of just adding the feed, I found myself looking at beautiful images of places I’ve been, places I haven’t been and the time flew by.
Listening to a Guardian Books podcast this week, Colin Thubron spoke of how he believes more and more young people are turning their backs on virtual travel and returning to personal, physical experience (my paraphrasing). This set me wondering. Was I really an e-culture inhabitant or a cultural tourist? At the moment, I’m very much a tourist. I’ve gone out to the right shops to buy my travelling equipment in the form of accounts to sites I seem unsure how to use. A bit like buying a big rucksack; you suspect you’ll need it but it looks so much uglier, bulkier and rougher than the sleek little McMcQueen Samsonite carry-on
Sleek, silver, sinuous
- Where to begin?
So, just as before any big trip, a lot of foutering around. Nothing is booked, reserved or really planned. Both exciting and anxiety-inducing!
3 Responses to 'LStream Summary Wk1'
Subscribe to comments with RSS or TrackBack to 'LStream Summary Wk1'.
on September 29th, 2011 at 1:08 pm
Great metaphors, Neil. I like the idea of the lifestream feeds as bulky and rather perplexing travel equipment that will probably come in handy but don’t exactly feel like the makings of a natural and carefree journey. And these matters of distractions, and how to measure and ‘capture’ them, also seem to fit in with the travel metaphor.
on September 29th, 2011 at 9:51 pm
Perhaps this is overkill, but your metaphors of luggage and equipment got me thinking about how the life stream is a Swiss army knife, with every feed another blade but all of them connected to one root. We are truly spread out over the web and regularly use different sites or tools to interact with different groups or audiences. Having everything together in one place feels rather weird at first. It’s going to be an interesting trip!