Matt Hamilton wrote a very poignant piece on testing the boundaries of Lifestreaming.
From his post
It seems that everyone is opening up online these days. Tools for lifestreaming like Twitter and Posterous encourage publishers to share all kinds of details…Each person has a different idea of what’s appropriate to post in a public forum but there are implications for the reader who digests all of these personal details as well.
Image courtesy of Flickr user DarkFrame
He writes about several examples of how the age of public transparency can include some awkward and often gut wrenching situations that we become spectators of. It’s an interesting observation and one that I’ve begun to notice as well.
He goes on to say
The solution, of course, is to turn off the source if it becomes a problem. That’s easy enough when you’re talking about turning off a TV show but it’s a little more difficult in the always-on, everyone’s-a-publisher world of lifestreaming. I don’t have any answers for this one, just processing out loud.
His solution or lack thereof is something that I think will always be an issue. We choose our social graph, often along a very complex set of data points that define each of the people that make it up. They are often based on factors that bring us joy, knowledge, laughter, and yes empathy. But that is the human condition and Lifestreaming now allows us to be able to share that with a tremendously wider range of people. That, in my mind, is what fuels us to be so open and sharing. The possibility of connecting with others on such a grand scale. In the end I feel that this is a really good thing.
Unless someone devises an algorithm that analyzes the mood of every stream item allowing us to define what to serve us, we will need to continue to take the good with the bad, and I think most of us are ok with that right?
