the timboucher experience

Table of Contents

1. Intro
2. 3-Point Summary
3. Plain Description
4. Lifestreaming, Datawakes & Sousveillance
5. Managing & Maintaining Mountains of Personal Data
6. Identity Management
7. Multi-User Tapestries
8. Conclusion

Intro

I figured one of the best ways to really solidify what the Mandala OS could and should be is to “exteriorize my workflow.” That is, to take a close look at how I use the internet and computers in general and then from there, look at what steps could be taken to make my process simpler, and to increase my flowthru or throughput. You’ll have to forgive me if I’m playing fast and loose with computer terminology. I’m really just grabbing hold of keywords temporarily to create a conceptual linguistic bridge to where I’m going. I expect the proper terminology will arrive as a matter of group discussion of issues common to many users. Once I get my screencasting situation squared away, I will also begin broadcasting narrative walkthrus of my workflow process.

3-Point Summary

There are three main tasks I use my computer system for, and they are all inter-related to one another and hang around the concept of reference point chains:

1. Receiving
2. Processing
3. Transmitting

Plain Description

Put into plain language, I go online and receive information in the form of reference points (web pages, emails, RSS feeds, searches, videos, images, snippets of text, etc), which I then take some kind of action on. Actions may include: reading, ignoring, saving, posting, emailing, etc. Posting and emailing, however, fit more neatly under the “transmitting” category: which I separated out into its own category because I may end up transmitting original or reference points which I did not receive online: things like original writing, music, audio, video and other forms of hybrid new media content.

Lifestreaming, Datawakes & Sousveillance

The new metaphor/paradigm push I’m seeing creep up on the edges of tech culture is Lifestreaming. Via Wikipedia:

Lifecasting is a continual broadcast of events in a person’s life through digital media. Typically, lifecasting is transmitted through the medium of the Internet and can involve wearable technology. [1] Lifecasting reverses the concept of surveillance, giving rise to sousveillance through portability, personal experience capture, daily routines and interactive communication with viewers.

And connected to that search:

Sousveillance (IPA: [su??ve?l?ns], original French [suv?j??s]) as well as inverse surveillance are terms coined by Steve Mann to describe the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant in the activity,[1] typically by way of small portable or wearable recording devices that often stream continuous live video to the Internet.

Inverse surveillance is a proper subset of sousveillance with a particular emphasis on “watchful vigilance from underneath” and a form of surveillance inquiry or legal protection involving the recording, monitoring, study, or analysis of surveillance systems, proponents of surveillance, and possibly also recordings of authority figures and their actions.

Note: You’ll also see me demonstrating through the above paragraphs all three of my main functional uses of the internet: finding reference points (in this case quotations from Wikipedia), processing them (cutting & pasting), and re-broadcasting them within the context of an original article through my timboucher.com domain.

For me, the concept of lifestreaming revolves quite heavily around my datawake. It’s not necessarily live video and audio feed of my perceptual/sensory environment (yet), but it has more to do with how I interact with data online: the pushing and pulling of bits and bytes in and out of proximity to my digital stand-in, the corpus of my website. Interestingly, Buckminster Fuller kept something called a Dymaxion Chronofile, a record of his life every fifteen minutes from 1915 to 1983. Also check out lifelogging, MyLifeBits, Steve Mann who has been recording and transmitting first person experiential data since the early 1980’s.

Managing & Maintaining Mountains of Personal Data

Whether you’re full-on lifecasting or simply trying to organize and monetize your datawake (which is more along the lines of my approach), managing an enormous amount of information about and by yourself becomes a rather immense task. You end up with essentially a gigantic library of information, archives stretching across many types of media and formats.

My organizational structure works something like this:

1. Personal Domain - in this case, TimBoucher.com which I’ve owned since possibly as far back as 1999, though I forget the exact date of original purchase. This domain has seen many stylistic, organizational, technological and content changes over the years. But it currently contains about six years of original research, writing and creative collaborative conversations with readers and visitors. This domain is monetized with two ad systems, Google AdSense and Text-Link-Ads, which together afford me a small monthly income, akin to having a part time job (though I spend well over full-time hours in up-keep). The content of this domain operates under a Public Domain license.
2. Multiple Email Accounts - I have two main email accounts through Gmail, one for personal/family use, and one for everthing else, a “work” email address, though my definition of work is very vague. The bulk of my email goes through my work address, and a contact form on TimBoucher.com catches and sends user email to that address. That address also features a custom signature which donates the contents of every email I send to the Public Domain. I also have a revolving cast of alternate and project-based email addresses with no real rhyme or reason behind any of it. I recently started using open anonymous password-less email services for temporary throw-away usages, via sites like Mailinator.com
3. Satellite Research Blocks - Mostly kept through Tumblr nowadays, though I’ve used delicious and other bookmarking services going way way back. Have taken to using Tumblr accounts as short-term collections of inter-related research, data-islands which contain a combination of reference points clustered from across the web, and tightly integrated into my main TimBoucher.com datawake with plenty of cross-references. I tend to create and then abandon these data structures when it intuitively feels right to do so. I’ve recently taken to “liberating” these infostreams when I am done with them by public posting the login information and inviting visitors and other users to edit them as they see fit.
4. Reference Point Dumps - Lately have been doing these through a service called Drop.io, and my primary usage has been in dumping for short term liberated storage image collections which I keep. As part of my daily browsings, I tend to download lots of images to re-post as part of my original writings. When I’m done with them on my computer, I drop them into a sub-folder. Eventually, I try to clear out those subfolders by posting several hundred images up to a drop.io account, with cross-links back to relevant posts on TimBoucher.com and a public password posting so that other users can come back and impact my data. Sort of a digital Johnny Appleseedism, I guess you could say.
5. Ephemeral Identities - By now you probably see the drift of my usage patterns on the web: I have the central core of my TimBoucher.com domain’s data structures, supported by and inter-linked through to many different services and user accounts on the web. In addition to Tumblr and Drop.io, I’ve also experimented with temporary microblogging accounts across Twitter and YouTube. My Twitter activity finally settled down into one main user account, but I had an interesting time cross-cutting the service in my own novel pathways, and have done some similar work on YouTube, wherein I have interlinked many different user accounts with different foci via tags and related keywords. Every Twitter account I have abandoned has been liberated with a public password, and many of the sub-identities were taken up by other users, almost like digital hermit crab shells.

Identity Management

While my process may seem convoluted to the casual viewer, what I’m really pointing towards in this case is identity management. I’m experimenting with ways a user can cascade their identity across many formats, accounts, media types and domains, with the central referent of one main hub (TimBoucher.com) controlled by the user as sort of a data stronghold where they are able to effectively manage their licensing, storage, monetization & data transmission patterns.

I have seen sadly few paradigmatic attempts by software and technology companies to address this central concern, other than perhaps flaccid discussions of overly-restrictive technologies like biometrics and the much-vaunted “internet driver’s license.” It may sound counter-intuitive, but I never worry about identity theft and I actively encourage content usage by outside parties. DRM does not interest me at all compared to some kind of comprehensive cohesive technology which will allow me to broadcast my own realitystream and creatively connect to and share with other users and their reality streams.

Multi-User Tapestries

Temporary satellite user accounts are also interesting to me because they could, conceivably be programmatically correlated against the timeline of posting here on this website. If you constructed tools to compare the data from my Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube and email accounts, you would see a much richer narrative tapestry evolve out of the interwoven context of which items I saved or re-transmitted, where I did it and why. A lot of these types of experiments I imagine may only pay off at such a time when the internet functions according to a wholly different paradigm and architecture than it does today. At that point, it is my hope that my datawake will take on a shimmering living quality from which it simply cannot be perceived nowadays.

Another thing I like about liberating user accounts is that it obfuscates user identity. If I create an account, the creation of that account is correlated to my user information, IP address, email, profile information, etc. But if I open up that information to any user, they can submerge their details in my own, using my identity as a temporary shell to hide their own or to blend with mine. It’s these sorts of thoughts and practices which lead me to the ideas behind my GOING BEYOND IDENTITY post. You could say that these open-ended multi-user accounts are experiments at creating free-form collective identities, data-islands reminiscent to the TAZ (temporary autonomous zones) of Hakim Bey - but that subject brings us into territory I’m not yet ready to talk about: micronationalism, technological users unions, things like that.

Conclusion

Hopefully that gives a thorough overview of how I use the internet, although I realize that narrated screencasts will probably be more effective on a micro level of showing the moment-to-moment workflow patterns which animate the above processes. I’d also like, at some point, to come back to this discussion and try to incorporate into it an analysis of how I as a user interact with other types of media and technology formats which are not computers: radio, telephony, video tools, musical instruments, natural technologies, etc. But all in good time!

• Web Browser Window Tarot Bingo Divination Tuning Associative Search
• I’m officially inside the psychic internet now!
• Crude Mandala OS #mandalaOS Screenshots, Experiential Tuning, Reference Point Filters
• #mandalaOS system of multi-witness, shifting viewpoint, narrative trails in cloud flock identity
• About The Internet Archive