What is a Lifestream?
Increasingly, our interactions with other people and the records of those interactions happen through the internet. The idea of the lifestream was born out of the implications of this fact. A lifestream is, put simply, a comprehensive record of a person’s daily activities, with an emphasis on those that take place online. It is not only a record, but a chronological view or stream of electronic documents that act as a sort of diary of a person’s online life. It is speculated that the concept of the lifestream had its origins in literature, specifically in the book Mirror Worlds, written in the 1990s by author David Gelernter. He also composed an article for the Washington Post newspaper, describing the lifestream as a system for managing one’s electronic information. At the far end of a lifestream would be documents from the past, such as a person’s birth certificate at the very beginning of it. Moving toward the near end of a lifestream, there would be more recent documents and intera
