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goalstream.pdf (276 KB)

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goalstream_hi.pdf (2965 KB)

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review2statement.pdf (41 KB)

Lifestreaming is sharing your experiences and activities online. It is a reverse-chronological flow of information that reveals patterns, provides opportunities for real-time interaction with others, and builds your reputation. Your lifestream is an archive of interactions between digital and flesh.

We document experiences, store them online, and share them, leading to new experiences to document. Like the Ouroboros, a lifestream is a cyclical, self-reflexive, constant re-creation of the self.

As lifestreaming becomes more accessible and we are able to extract more and more data from our lives, meaningful parsing of the information becomes more difficult. Lifestreaming can generate a lot of “noise”–a sea of information that is hard to use. Approaching a lifestream with a specific purpose or goal (“goalstreaming”) can help categorize and focus updates.

Can one use a lifestream to make measurable progress towards a goal? The Financial Goalstream case study report details my recent goalstream experiment. The goal I chose was “to understand and simplify my personal finances.” I fed everything finance-related in my life into one site, so that I could first visualize my financial situation, then measure it, and then begin to consciously manage it.

Although there are privacy concerns that arise when putting any information online, the primary value of goalstreaming is that it is public. We share our experiences for motivation, accountability, feedback, and to build reputation.

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