I recently streamed a 5.5hr session of me building a prototype (for patrons). I've done a few of these now—I'm interested in how livestreams might help convey tacit knowledge, particularly in domains which are normally apprenticeship-oriented.
Some observations on the medium:
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With the stream going, I found it surprisingly easy to stay 100% focused and on task for a 5hr session. This isn’t usually a big deal for me—I’ve got strategies for distraction—but as in meditation, the process usually requires some “returning to the breath.” Here it didn’t.
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I felt obliged to narrate as I worked. I think the video would be massively less useful without that. Narration is taxing—I found I couldn’t ruminate while also narrating. So sometimes when I got stuck I’d have to switch back and forth.
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In a “rubber ducky” sense, forcing myself to narrate could be helpful. Sometimes things becomes clearer when I try to explain why I’m confused. But some mental trails are simply inchoate, and will remain so for quite some time. Trying to make them legible can damage them.
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When stuck during streams, I felt pressure to get myself unstuck much sooner than I normally would, e.g. by giving up or switching strategies. This is sometimes a useful pressure, but often not—many times I’ve broken through a block by banging my head against it for hrs (or wks).
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I felt a little hit of gratification at the end of my workday when producing these streams. My projects are all super long, so a given day rarely produces legible output—but hey, look, I published a video! This strikes me as dangerous.
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I’ve been training myself to draw fulfillment from the *process* of creative work, rather than outputs. Feeling a boost from publishing a stream seems like it would help here, but I fear it’s actually just manufacturing an output and satisfying the outcome-oriented impulse.
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I felt some hazy sense of “performing” while on stream. This is certainly bad: I need to feel totally unfettered by social expectations in my creative space. Otherwise I’ll be afraid to do hard things, or follow impulses I don’t understand. Maybe performativity would diminish.
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Tactically speaking, I’d feel hesitant to let myself get side-tracked down a rabbit hole—even though such rabbit holes are often essential to later projects. Streaming is probably more appropriate when I have a clear plan to do something concrete for many hours.
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Do people really learn anything from these streams? People certainly claimed to learn things from my earlier streams. I can believe it, maybe, but I wonder to what extent people are deluding themselves. Certainly it’s extremely inefficient: what’s the insight-per-minute?
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“Livestreaming” is the trend, but maybe it’s better to just post screen captures. In my 5hr session, I spent the first 20m giving context and motivation. Someone watching live would miss all that and would get much less out of it. But “presence” does offer interesting tingles.
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More concretely, many viewers are used to faster-paced rhythms. One viewer sent me notes on a session which included "why is this an important goal? Was it really worth 20 minutes? would be good to track the goal tree here" (nb this is often impossible)
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I felt some hazy sense of “performing” while on stream. This is certainly bad: I need to feel totally unfettered by social expectations in my creative space. Otherwise I’ll be afraid to do hard things, or follow impulses I don’t understand. Maybe performativity would diminish.
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Interesting to contrast this feeling with my practice of writing monthly essays for patrons. I get a sense of satisfaction in publishing one of those, but I think that feeling is much healthier, because the writing process really makes me sharpen my ideas.
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I felt a little hit of gratification at the end of my workday when producing these streams. My projects are all super long, so a given day rarely produces legible output—but hey, look, I published a video! This strikes me as dangerous.
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If tacit knowledge is being transferred, you wouldn’t be able to see it. And the people learning it might not realize immediately that they learned something.
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One of the most important lessons I learned, many years ago, came from watching get stuck on a problem while screencasting.
The lesson was an empathetic resonance. It has to be real time and uncut, otherwise it wouldn’t have transferred.
I can still feel it.
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idk how it generalises for others, but personally i’ve repeatedly found that extremely inefficient learning is the best learning!
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yeah "be a kid hanging around the shop", massively underrated
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You also have to consider how useful the insights are as well. Even if it’s one insight per hour is it an insight they could not get somewhere else?
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And the audience could be productive while watching you, e.g. working on something at the same time with you in the background.
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I generally don’t, but one thing I appreciate about livestreams is that it demystifies a process. You don’t necessarily learn how to do the thing, but you do remove any preconceptions that the thing is hard to imagine, because you just witnessed it.
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