Zuckerburg has taken it just one tab too far.
I was okay with the privacy setting concerns. I was okay with the liberal usage of my personal info for the sake of advertising. I was even okay with their attempt to create a near universal currency – Facebook Credits – that aimed to totally eradicate modern consumerism as we know it.
But this? This is too much.
The recently launched Timeline layout takes your entire Facebook history and organizes it into a neat, easy-to-creep chronological history. With just a couple clicks, visitors to your profile can now time warp back to your earliest days online. If you’re a Gen Y’er like myself, that probably means your old back & fourths with high school sweethearts and bickering acquaintances are now instantly viewable by people like, say, your roommates, family members, or perhaps even your boss.
In other words, the apocalypse is here.
It’s one of the biggest in-your-face changes that’s ever been made to the service, and one that will prompt many users to re-evaluate their relationship with the platform. In my case, it led to a drastic social media cleanse, which I documented in a post titled The Night I Deleted 83% Of The People From My Life. I was not alone. Countless friends and readers responded to the piece, telling me that they felt the same way; the social network experience was just becoming too big a beast to responsibly maintain.
Timeline has the potential to distort both how we think and the way we’re observed. Let us examine 3 areas of concern in increasing order of severity:
1. Old Wounds (emotional nuisance)
Whereas previous generations were forced to rewind old mixtapes or visit kitschy ice cream parlors to pay emotional homage to their old beaus of yesteryear, we can now revisit and over-examine our past relationships in about the same amount of time as it takes to check the weather.
It’s not just romantic ghosts – think of all the dated social affiliations and connections you’ve accumulated throughout the years. Digging up gossip fuel and incriminating dirt on one of your friends has never been easier. A new browser tab here, a clickity click there, and presto! You’re now free to sift through each and every interaction you had with the people you once held true to your heart. It’s like pouring salt on old wounds. Or perhaps, more accurately, browser cookies on weakened firewalls.
God I hate the Internet.
Perhaps a stronger and more emotionally evolved person would be able to treasure this newfound opportunity to revisit past relationships. I’d rather saw off my left thumb with a sea urchin. To each their own, I suppose.
2. Judgment of Character (professional liability)
I started using Facebook when I was 16. You remember being 16, right? No? Let me refresh your memory. You sucked. Like myself, you probably said a lot of dumb things trying to impress people or be funny. Perhaps you even discussed Wham! That’s expected of you. After all, you were a kid. Never fear - assuming you were born before the 90s, those silly notions are but distant memories, safely nestled away exactly where they belong: in the past.
My generation is less fortunate.
Our entire dopey adolescence is documented online in great detail. And since many of us – having grown into adults and young professionals - now have Friend Lists that include coworkers and even bosses, the availability of said conversations/photos/thoughts is alarming. Would you really want your supervisor or director leafing through a personal journal you kept in the tenth grade?
This is particularly distressing when you consider the increasing popularity of social media background checks as potential employers begin to sift through your online profiles with an increasing degree of attention and scrutiny. After all, they don’t want your social misdemeanors to shine poorly on their company. One can only imagine how difficult it would be to find a suitable candidate for prime minister had today’s politicians been tweeting since prepubescence.
The pixilated skeletons in your digital closet have never been easier to uncover. Perhaps it’s time to change the locks.
3. The Ability to Forget (psychological cancer)
In his book Delete: The Virtue Of Forgetting In The Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-Schonberger looks at the cumbersome mental effects that archival tech mediums have wrought upon us. Thanks to the digital revolution, our capacity to remember is as strong as our nearest internet connection. The distant past has become no further than a few clicks away, making our personal histories inescapable and clouding our ability to make unbiased contemporary decisions.
In other words, it’s difficult to focus on the present when it’s so easy to look back on what’s happened in the past.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for preserving memories. Matter of fact, it’s something I wish I could do a better job of. I wish I took more pictures or recorded a daily journal. The ability to continually revisit and learn from the past is one of the greatest blessings modern technology has provided us with. But I think recollection is far better when it happens on a macro-level. I much rather reminisce via the collective feelings and memories that have permanently burned themselves into my mind, as opposed to referencing an old wall-to-wall my friend and I had about 2 Fast 2 Furious five years ago. There’s a reason you remember certain things, right?
Analyzing your past will become a far more daunting experience when you can instantly wade through thousands of pristinely preserved conversations and exchanges. It’s sensory overload and it could hurt us. Wouldn’t it all be so much more genuine if we focused on what we remember vs. what we have archived? If we began to spend more time looking forward and less time curating what’s behind us? I have a feeling it just might make things a lot more enjoyable.
Then again, maybe I’m just petrified of my past.
Brook Johnston is a copywriter for FUSE Marketing Group in Toronto.
Tags: Digital, social media
Posted in Uncategorized | |
For Gordon Ramsay, his legal action states that:
