Hey Clare,
this is something I am struggling with too. I think I am conditioned through my job that when I add anything to the web it has to meet certain standards of aesthetics and accessibility, the lifestream approach doesn’t really live up to this so I can’t help myself, I want to go back and edit, tweak and visualise everything.
I like to think that the concept of showing a stream of real life rather than presented life we see on facebook and Instagram is somehow more real and grittier. I think I understand it as a concept, as a kick back, doesn’t mean I enjoy it in this sense 🙂
I too have had a bit of a nightmare with IFTTT and wasted hours trying to get it to do something I could have done manually in half an hour so I feel your pain.
Maybe if we force ourselves to engage, we may be pleasantly surprised to see changes in our assumptions and maybe even our own behaviours by the end of the course?
Eli
from Comments for Clare’s EDC blog http://ift.tt/2jsI0wE
via IFTTT
I agree Eli. My primary concern at first was that if I created this RSS feed with IFTTT that we are supposed to, then I would have a jumble of posts and comments on my own blog, that would be difficult to work through. At a minimum somewhat time-consuming and confusing. And it is true. I only have half the class done in terms of RSS feeds for comments and already I find myself scrolling and scrolling, trying to make sense of it all.
Jeremy had sent me a note when I asked a question about IFTTT that did shed some light on how this is supposed to work. He simply said the Lifestream blog was supposed to be just that, full of stuff. (I kind of paraphrased here.) Well, if that is the case, then I guess I am doing it right so far.
One thing did strike me: Looking at my blog I got the sense that there was too much; too many people commenting abut everything. then I realized our lives can be just as well. How many people do we have that demand attention from us for an unending variety of reasons? And we try and juggle it all; sometimes with more success than at other times. Then I realized also that it is so much easier to move past a post I really don’t have an interest in or care much about, as opposed to blowing past a “real” person in my presence who wants to talk to me. That’s the impersonal aspect of all of this that I may end up changing my attitude about. The only inference between your posts for example, and actually talking to you, is our presence in each other’s space. Perhaps the more we “talk” to each other here the more we will get to know about each other because we are simply forced to do it. I’ll spend the rest of the day thinking about that, more than likely.
#mscedc