Keeping Up with Social Media

The idea of Lifestreaming is something Marwick talks about in her book Status Update. It is the concept of broadcasting oneself online for everyone to see. This can be from updating a Facebook status to posting a tweet. What is important to Lifestreaming is the audience that consumes it. With social media it is whoever is your friend or follows you. With reality television it is the viewers on that network. Most Lifestreamers use the internet to broadcast. Through broadcasting oneself you can gain a following. Therefore self-branding (from my previous post) and Lifestreaming go hand in hand. By carefully editing a lifestream to your edited self you can gain a following and in turn generate bigger numbers: views and income.

I think one of the biggest Lifestreamers we can think of is the Kardashian family as a whole. They broadcast their life through their reality television show Keeping Up with the Kardashians and all of its spin offs such as Kourtney and Khloe take Miami. They are also huge on social media such as Instagram and have generated their own personal apps that help you stay up to date with their lives and what they are doing.

Khloe Kardashians Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/khloekardashian/?hl=en

We can see through the Kardashian family how Lifestreaming can create a huge following and a huge income.

But can Lifestreaming be dangerous? Once someone begins to Lifestream can they ever stop if they have a following? Just like actors from a movie, once someone has an audience they have forever lost a part of their private world and must maintain the edited self they portrayed to the world in the first place.