Lifestreaming

In January of 1995, I took a month-long trip to Australia.

Being an early-twenty-something man, I was looking for adventure and during the "planning" stages of my trip, I decided not to plan anything. And so, after 25 hours of travel time I found myself in Melborune, at midnight, on the eve of the Australian Open. Needless to say, places to crash for the night were scarce. All the hostels were booked and the longer I roamed the city, led only by my Rough Guide, the more likely it became that a park bench would be my bed for the night. My feet aching, the pack on my back weighing heavier by the second, I found a room at last. It was priced considerably more than I had budgeted on a per-night basis, but I desperately needed a bed and a shower soon thereafter.

The next morning I packed up, turned in the key, and headed out into the (day-lit) wilds of Melbourne. Fully awake and refreshed, I reveled in the thought that nobody knew where I was or what I was doing. It was a sense of freedom unlike anything I had experienced - totally disconnected from everybody I knew.

I recently wrote about Information Fragmentation and how the sheer number of information sources and viable vehicles for information consumption can be simply overwhelming. And then I heard the term "Lifestreaming."

Mashable has posted a nice overview of 8 Lifestreaming Services. The thrust behind these services is a solution to the Information Fragmentation issue and an aggregation point for the volumes of information flowing out of our social media accounts and RSS subscriptions. In the interest of science, I signed up for one - FriendFeed. Creating the account was simple and pulling data from across my social accounts took nothing more than providing my username and password for each. I can then, just as easily, subscribe to my friend's FriendFeed to see all of their social media / RSS activity.

Good Lord.

I can't help but wonder - do we really need all this hyper-connectivity? With a service like this, communication can be reduced to a steam of FlickrDiggStumbleTwitters and it's quite possible for me to know what every one of my friends is doing nearly every moment of their online lives. When is it too much? When do the details of our daily existence become so available that we lose our sense of self. If everybody knows everything about you, what's left?

I suppose the argument is that these services are, clearly, optional. For me, I miss that morning in Australia and I've deleted my FriendFeed account.

Related Posts: Aggregation for the Mainstream

Comments

[james]

taped to my monitor is a yellowed cartoon from the wall street journal of a man turning to walk away from his desk and a cartoon bubble coming from his pc says: "where do you think you're going?"

the pull of this thing is so strong and yet to be unconnected is what provides for so much of the good content that we look for in getting connected.

seems pretty obvious but i have to constantly remind myself of the fact. and what about when i say to the kid, "okay that's enough screen time" just so that i can hop on the machine to check my email?