Jacob Kramer-Duffield thinks

Warren Ellis has some thoughts on lifestreaming, via coffee and jerky; I deal with the foodie bits over here. Mostly, he frames it as a series of questions about the efficacy of lifestreaming; the key ones are:

Right now, I’m eating jerky and drinking a cup of coffee. Neither of these came from objects with a net presence, of course. I have to photograph them, curse the really fucking cranky camera in my phone, and upload them. What’s the information? What is the context?…

How much use is this information without personal context? What do you come away with? What have you learned about my life from this instance of lifeblogging, and would you gain a more informed context from a continuous lifestream?…

But what good is a lifestream that communicates nothing about what something means?…

Using the internet to push around basic information in new ways is fun. But it has no meaning without a human context. It’s just lists and bad photographs. That’s not a life….

Have you learned anything useful from what I’m consuming?

I’m not sure that I agree entirely. A blog is a kind of liefestream, albeit with a lot of missing cues, but that’s half the fun, isn’t it? With any kind of writing, and with any writer worth their salt it’s as much a question of what’s left out – and left for the reader to fill in – as what’s written. Lifestreaming, if it’s understood as an attempt to catalog every single thing that happens in a day and put it in some kind of infinitely-faceted context, is no more interesting than reading someone’s diary of every single thing they do in a day. Perhaps good for a lark – and a giving of thanks that you’re not yourself trapped by such a compulsion – but nothing of particular merit or worthy of striving for as a goal. Just because technology will allow us to not only log every conversation and track every receipt in full streaming video doesn’t mean that it’ll be interesting.

But: as our personal technologies capture more and more of the various bands and aspects world around us, more and more continuously and with more and more (often automatically recorded) context, what lifestreaming as opportunity space offers will be increasingly exciting. You wouldn’t want to post the entirety of your walk around the block – with video, audio, GPS coordinates, barometric pressure, etc. – as a lifestream entry. But maybe there was a moment when you looked up and to the left, and the sun glinted just so through the tops of the trees tipped with last night’s frost, and a hawk soared past. Maybe that would be worth both remembering and transmitting to the world (or your little slice of the Intarwub), with or without fuller context.

That doesn’t quite answer Ellis’ central question:

Have you learned anything useful from what I’m consuming?

Well, sure. Do I know what it tastes like, what it was like to be Warren Ellis eating that jerky, drinking that coffee? No. But for me: I don’t care. Indeed, it goes beyond not caring – I find most of human experience entirely ineffable, mine included. I enjoy talking to people, hearing them describe what life is like for them, but long ago came to the conclusion that that I was an unreliable enough narrator of my own experience, and could not really hope to understand what it was like to be them or to experience things as they did.

So what does it mean? No matter how much or how little metadata’s attached, it still only means something to me as a function of my own (imperfectly understood) experience.