Lifestreaming is distinguished from personal diaries by networked public readability
Evidence
Tracking one’s personal information is not a new concept. Diarist Samuel Pepys recorded details of his daily life for ten years. Samuel Johnson and Benjamin Franklin were both compulsive self-trackers: Franklin kept a chart chronicling his daily adherence to thirteen self-identified virtues such as frugality, chastity, and humility. Keeping a diary, even a very detailed one, is a fairly common practice today. Former Senator Bob Graham, for instance, keeps color-coded daily logs of his activities that are so meticulous that they were admissible as evidence in government investigations. And tracking food and exercise, or simply counting calories, is a common precept of weight-loss programs. What makes the lifestream different from its paper predecessors is that lifestreamers use the internet to make this information widely readable. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 545
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines the key distinction between old self-tracking practices and the modern lifestream: the internet-mediated public readability.
- XREF: Connects to Foucault’s technologies of the self and to Franklin’s virtue-tracking as a historical antecedent of quantified self culture. — connects to: Lifestreaming is continuous self-sharing to an invisible networked audience — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 538; Lifestreaming audiences differ from networked publics by spanning multiple sites — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 551; Daily private journaling tracks individual listening progress over time. — Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, 109 (+5 more)
Broader Connections
- Lifestreaming audiences differ from networked publics by spanning multiple sites
#expands(0.85) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 551 - Lifestreaming without an audience is merely tracking, not sharing.
#qualifies(0.85) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 548 - Daily private journaling tracks individual listening progress over time.
#contradicts(0.80) — Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, 109 - Journaling builds cumulative meaning across accumulated listening experiences
#contradicts(0.75) — Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, 216 - Daily life is now comprehensively recorded into a continuous electronic text
#expands(0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 574 - Journaling listening sessions reveals otherwise invisible patterns of progress
#contradicts(0.70) — Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, 190 - Continuous connection converts lived activity into machine-readable data and a branded, conditional ‘truth’.
#expands(0.70) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 401