Lifestreaming is an act of documenting and sharing aspects of one's daily experiences online, via a lifestream website that publishes things of a person's choosing (e.g. photos, social media, videos).
History The term "lifestream" was coined by Eric Freeman and David Gelernter at Yale University in the mid-1990s to describe "...a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream. The tail of your stream contains documents from the past (starting with your electronic birth certificate). Moving away from the tail and toward the present, your stream contains more recent documents—papers in progress or new electronic mail; other documents (pictures, correspondence, bills, movies, voice mail, software) are stored in between. Moving beyond the present and into the future, the stream contains documents you will need: reminders, calendar items, to-do lists. The point of lifestreams isn't to shift from one software structure to another but to shift the whole premise of computerized information: to stop building glorified file cabinets and start building (simplified, abstract) artificial minds; and to store our electronic lives inside."
Before lifestreaming The concept existed long before it was first introduced to the public. Globally known public figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein were collecting their stream of personal and professional data, an act that could be considered lifestreaming.
On the Web Social network aggregators adapted Freeman and Gelernter's original concept to address the vast flows of personal information and exchange created by social network services such as MySpace or Facebook ("web companies large and small are embracing this stream" of providing lifestreaming). Other online applications have emerged to facilitate a user's lifestream. Posterous offered a variety of unique features to enhance its basic blogging function. Tumblr is a similar concept, but with slightly different features.
Lifestream websites Websites accommodating of lifestreaming gather together all the information someone wants to display and order it in reverse-chronology. "Each person designs her daily life to some extent-for instance basic time management tools. Putting one's life online might provide the critical perspective to help redesign it. It is not just an organizational tool, but a tool that allows critical evaluation, reassessment and tweaking daily choice"
However, there is a clear distinction between the act of lifestreaming as a simple form of editorial extension to one's activity stream, and the production of a well-designed lifestream which involves commitment and requires the technical skills necessary to create and maintaining its underlying site.
The increase in people keeping track of their lives digitally is considered by futurologists a step towards artificial intelligence.
The "publish then filter" is discussed at length and breadth in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. The main focus is on the fact that you can publish anything, as it may be helpful to others.
Benefits of lifestreaming Social networking services allow people to keep in touch with their family or acquaintances while being away from them. The hard boundary between social and professional space is becoming thinner. Consequently, this provides a sense of belonging, security and companionship while being in the workplace with an employer.
Transparency and authenticity The rapid accessibility of one's lifestreaming activity can provide important information and inspire readers.
Data mining Lifestreams also represent a source of information about people's intents that can be mined. A common bridge between all concepts of lifestreaming is the gathering of statistical data. With computerized support that simplifies one's daily choices and activities, it can be much easier to identify certain common traits in one's behavior. Moreover, lifestreaming can keep track of budget, calories, physical activity or sleep cycles.
Social integration According to work in Activity Theory, reading one's lifestream is an act of integration in the community. In an individual's mind, the needs and interests of other people are ideally seen. Consequently, his or her activity imitates a pattern and through this process an individual is integrated within the community. Lifestreaming has altered the dynamics of maintaining connections and facilitating a sense of community regardless of the geographical distance. This particular facet of lifestreaming serves as a valuable tool for constructing and nurturing online communities where individuals with shared interests can converge.
Monetization Monetizing a lifestream was first introduced by author Tim Ferriss. In his books he presents instructions for designing a business that can self-develop, being convinced that one should live the life he wants the moment he wants instead of waiting for something to happen. With this belief, he proposes selling digital information products that can be automated and turned into profit.
Lifecasting Lifecasting is a continual live streaming of events in a person's life through digital media. Typically, lifecasting is transmitted through the medium of the Internet and can involve wearable technology."Intelligent Image Processing", by Steve Mann, John Wiley and Sons, 2001, 384ppSteve Mann, James Fung and Raymond Lo, "Cyborglogging with Camera Phones: Steps Toward Equiveillance", Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia 2006, Santa Barbara, California, October 23--27, 2006 Lifecasting reverses the concept of surveillance, giving rise to sousveillance through portability, personal experience capture, daily routines and interactive communication with viewers.Steve Mann, "Continuous lifelong capture of personal experience with EyeTap", keynote address, ACM International Multimedia Conference, Proceedings of the 1st ACM workshop on Continuous archival and retrieval of personal experiences (CARPE 2004), New York, New York, October 15, 2004, p.1 - 21
Originally being called "lifelogging" or "lifestreaming," during the summer of 2007, Justin Kan's term lifecasting escalated into general usage and became the accepted label of the movement. Other labels for lifecasting and related have occasionally surfaced, including cyborglog, glog, lifeblog, lifeglob, livecasting and wearcam.
Lifecasting today looks a little different from the continuous stream first imagined by Mann. It has taken new forms today, such as Instagram and Snapchat, as it is the ways that modern lifecasters share their life experiences within the world of their social networks. Although it isn't a continuous stream, the motivations of "life sharing" remains the same.
Precursors Jean-Luc Godard said, "Cinema is not a dream or a fantasy. It is life." In the pre-history of the lifecasting movement, the introduction of lightweight, portable cameras during the early 1960s, as used in the Cinéma vérité and Direct cinema movements, changed the nature of documentary filmmaking. Technological improvements in audio and the invention of smaller, less intrusive cameras brought about more naturalistic situations in documentary films by Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, the Maysles Brothers and others. While filmmakers such as Michel Auder, Jonas Mekas and Ed Pincus created cinematic diaries,Tilove, Jonathan. "Pulled by Katrina, Documentarian Returns to the Front Lines of Film," Newhouse News Service, June 15, 2006. the sculptor Claes Oldenburg, in the early 1960s, had theatrical showings of his home movies. Andy Warhol, who once said, "I like boring things," introduced the notion that life could be captured simply by aiming a fixed camera at subjects usually regarded as "boring" and later projecting the unedited footage. The documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio observed that "with any cut at all, objectivity fades away."
A milestone came in 1973 on PBS when ten million PBS viewers followed the lives of the Loud family each week on An American Family, a documentary series often cited as the beginning of reality television. Six years later, the series was satirized by Albert Brooks in his first feature film, Real Life (1979).
Author William Gibson featured "God's Little Toy," a lifecasting mini-blimp, that followed subjects around—for their lives—in his 1999 novel All Tomorrow's Parties.
Lifecasters
The first person to do lifecasting, i.e. stream continuous live first-person video from a wearable camera, was Steve Mann whose experiments with wearable computing and streaming video in the early 1980s led to Wearable Wireless Webcam. Starting in 1994, Mann continuously transmitted his everyday life 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and his site grew in popularity to become Cool Site of the Day in 1995. Using a wearable camera and wearable display, he invited others to both see what he was looking at, over the Web, as well as send him live feeds or messages in real time. In 1998 Mann started a community of lifecasters which has grown to more than 20,000 members. In a recent article by Mann entitled "My 'Augmediated' Life," he compares the early developments of his technologies to that of Google Glass when discussing issues of augmented reality and the ways in which these wearable technologies mediate the user to the world.
Jennifer Ringley's JenniCam (1996–2004) attracted mass media attention, as noted by Cnet: "JenniCam, beginning in 1996, was the first really successful 'lifecasting' attempt." Ringley appeared on talk shows and magazines covers, and her pioneering effort was followed by collegeboyslive.tv and Brian Diva Cox' MagicsWebpage.tv (1998 - 2013). That same year, the streaming of live video from the University of Toronto became a social networking phenomenon.Cyborgs Broadcast Orientation Worldwide
ZAC ADAMS Started CollegeBoysLive (1998–present) which became the first 24/7 live reality site featuring a group of unrelated gay guys living in a house together with over 56 streaming cameras and audio. Collegeboyslive chose 6 random people to live in the house and have their entire lives broadcast 24/7 for 6 months where viewers can watch and listen to them as they lived their lives. Collegeboyslive.com is currently the only live webcam house still up and operating today.collegeboyslive.com Collegeboyslive.com CollegeBoysLive was also the first website to have a movie made about one of the groups from arrival to departure. Edited by George O'Donnell the movie takes you into the life of the boys who live in such a public place
"We Live In Public" was a 24/7 Internet conceptual art experiment created by Josh Harris in December 1999. With a format similar to TV's Big Brother, Harris placed tapped telephones, microphones and 32 robotic cameras in the home he shared with his girlfriend, Tanya Corrin. Viewers talked to Harris and Corrin in the site's chatroom. Others on camera included New York artists Alex Arcadia and Alfredo Martinez, as well as =JUDGECAL= and Shannon from pseudo.com fame. Harris launched the online live video platform, Operator 11.
DotComGuy arrived in 2000, and the following year, the Seeing-Eye-People Project combined live streaming with social networking to assist the visually challenged. After Joi Ito's Moblog (2002), web publishing from a mobile device, came Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits (2004), an experiment in digital storage of a person's lifetime, including full-text search, text/audio annotations and hyperlinks.