The lifestream is a record of a person’s daily activities, with an emphasis on online interactions. It originated from literature and can include past, present, and future information. Online services aggregate all activity into one stream for easy viewing.
Increasingly, our interactions with other people and records of those interactions are via the Internet. The idea of the flow of life arose from the implications of this fact. A lifestream is, simply put, a complete record of a person’s day-to-day activities, with an emphasis on those that take place online. It’s not just a record, but a chronological view or electronic document stream that serves as a sort of diary of a person’s online life.
The lifestream concept is speculated to have its origins in literature, specifically in the book Mirror Worlds, written in the 1990s by author David Gelernter. He also wrote an article for the Washington Post newspaper describing the lifestream as a system for managing one’s electronic information. At the end of a life stream there would be documents from the past, such as a person’s birth certificate at the beginning of it. Moving towards the end of a life stream, there would be more recent documents and interactions, such as emails, photos, voicemails, videos, and other types of digital records created by that person.
A life stream does not necessarily end with the present moment, but also includes future plans. Included are electronic notes and reminders, calendars, and other items of future importance, so that the present moment is more or less in the middle of the flow. Your life stream can include as much or as little as you like and is only limited by the amount of effort you put into it.
To bring the flow of life from a concept to something that is visible in the real world, most people use some sort of online service that aggregates all online activity into one stream of information, where everything can be seen at once. For example, a person may belong to various social networking sites, as well as services through which he posts pictures and videos on the Internet, and this may be just the beginning. All of these digital records, however, “live” in different places on the Internet and a large degree of browsing is required to see them all.
A lifestream service solves this problem by coordinating interactions with social networking sites, blogs, and anything that leaves a digital trail online. A person’s life stream, visible in a web page format, catalogs each new update with a timestamp, forming a chronological feed. There are many online services available that allow you to create and customize your lifestream in any way you choose.
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