The content in my lifestream this week feels disordered and unquantifiable, It’s kind of all over the place. I’ve written about a couple of current political events, about a genuine David of a technological problem which led to a Goliath unsettlement, about statistics and TV. I’ve written about what I’m reading, reactions to and rants about the stuff I’m encountering, and some of the more tangential things I’m considering as I plan to get the lifestream ready for submission.
One of the things I’ve read this week is Bayne’s chapter on research and posthumanism in the SAGE Handbook of E-learning. She provides a couple of examples of how research methods are used to privilege order over difference:
This desire to stabilise essence is an attempt to produce order and regularity in the guise of categories that erase difference and privilege identity among seemingly similar things (Jackson, 2013, p. 742; in Bayne, 2016, p. 89)
In my lifestream summaries over the course I’ve attempted, sometimes artificially and sometimes not, and sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to unify content. I’ve tried to gather ideas, to identify themes which resonate in a variety of posts. Privileging order over difference. This week, I think I’ll privilege difference instead. Perhaps the lifestream’s uncategorised, uncatalogued messiness and diversity can function as an anti-theme. Or, given what I’ve read this week, a post-theme.
I can’t resist a chance to theorise, though. The lifestream, in its happy medley of heterogeneity, has been untethered, much like we have. We have been released from a weekly cycle; it’s as though we’ve been swimming lengths for ten weeks and now the lanes have been abandoned. I’m floating along, unshackled but still bounded – still with the edge of the pool or the fixed deadline in sight. So maybe the lifestream this week represents me: bobbing along, treading water, flailing occasionally, but definitely waving, not drowning.
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