Last week I decided to jump the gun and enable Facebook’s “Timeline” upgrade – which, just FYI, is rolling out starting this week whether you like it or not. Facebook users who go into nuclear freakout mode over every minor tweak are really going to have to eat their Wheaties for this one, so I wanted a preview of what it is they would be raging against.
This is an evolution of what Facebook is, and a radical one at that. But I choose the word evolution because it does not feel like a hairpin turn; really, it is a realization of potential. I believe strongly that the best creations within a medium are those things which, inherently, need that medium to exist. One of the reasons that the deceptively-simple Tetris looms so large in the legacy of the early generations of video gaming is that its very premise – summoning infinite numbers of Somethings out of Nothing and then, in puzzled combinations, zapping them back into Nothingness again for as long as the God-Player can keep things balanced within defined tolerances – needed a virtual reality with rules that, while different from our own, could be intuited if we expanded our minds into it.
Facebook Timeline is, simply, your life, in network identity form. Facebook does the first step for you – replacing your “Wall” with a “Timeline” that extends back to your birthdate (which you already provided), to your years at the schools you attended (which you already provided), and to an algorithmically-determined selection of posts and pictured shared since the day you joined Facebook – which, with typically-puckish hubris, Facebook identifies as a landmark date in your life.
Then, with simple tools, it invites you to fill in the blank spaces in all the intervening years. When did you move to a new town? Start and end jobs? Who are your siblings and relatives? (Their birth-dates will start to populate your timeline as well.) What are the major trips you remember? Great achievements? Do you happen to have pictures or videos you’d like to upload that help represent those milestones? These photo albums of yours – where were they taken and when?
We’ve been trained for this. Prepared. Tagging photos has become second nature for even mild Facebookers. This just extends that habit. And, without too much work, you can soon find yourself with a rich, cleanly-designed, and surprisingly-moving, visualization that gradually zooms you in from the shape of your life to today, and your current mundane observations about holiday shopping and your snarky jokes about That Current Event.
Roger Ebert wrote that, in the process of writing his memoir, the reality ran counter to his fears that all these memories from a full life had long ago expelled themselves from his brain. It turned out that the mere act of reflecting started an astonishing tide of images and feelings and moments that had always been there, just waiting to be summoned again.
Facebook Timeline is a version of that. You can click to any year in your life and zoom to the highlights. A map of the world gets automatically spackled with marks showing the places you have visited, and you can summon up all your pictures of those places along with notes of the reasons you were there. Already, I have found myself asking my Mother just what month and year it was that we took that family vacation to Maui, and wondering if there is a day in my near future that I could huddle with some family photo albums and a good scanner.
Obviously, there are onerous privacy concerns about this whole thing, and as usual, Facebook has taken the maddening initiative to default every biographical penstroke you make with their “share with the entire planet” setting. This can be fixed. Your friends and family can include you in their timeline events, and you can even post notes at any moment on their Timelines, should you want to recall some piece of shared history. I’ve already posted a note dated 1995 to my college roommate. These settings, too, can be managed, and controlled, although as with anything involving Facebook and privacy, an active attitude of vigilance and discretion is healthy.
I have a personal attitude when it comes to romantic history which means I will not be naming the names and durations of all my ex-relationships, or dropping a note on the date I lost my virginity. Come to think of it, I can give you the month and year for that but can’t completely swear to the date without a little research – but Facebook lets you tag by month only in these cases. I think love and sex, when shared with others, is shared even in memory, and therefore doesn’t belong entirely to me. As with, say, possessions that get merged in co-habitation, there is an assumed and-politely understood level of allowable use for these shared memories. Everyone can set their own tolerances, but I am not going to just assume someone who wants nothing to do with me now is going to be happy if I start writing about what noises she makes in the dark. That seems plainly dumb. And so, knowing that the Timeline I choose to make is indeed shared with friends and family and acquaintances, I will choose a level of discretion that I think suits that, and keep more intimate memories within myself to love or abhor. It is not all of us – it is The Social Us, dressed as we do when we leave the house.
I feel as if every player in social networking has been, consciously or unconsciously, knocking on this door. Google, being Google, tried to lasso together disparate Googling muscles and organs to create a version of this and push us on it with brute power via Google+, and they are not done trying at all, but I think they just fell way behind. Even MySpace, I believe, was flying close to a primitive version of this when its wax wings melted. Facebook wants to be the website that everyone on Earth is on, and for them to be, in some form, on it effectively all the time. They have done more to achieve this goal than anyone in the history of the Internet, and this is a bold step that sticks to their principles of being intuitive, inviting, and universal. I suspect people are going to realize they have always WANTED this, once the shock wears off.
When my Grandfather died a few years ago, the funeral home produced a biographical video, with photos and text highlights and heart-tugging music that walked us through a brief distillation of his treasured life – his military service, his work, his marriage and family and hobbies, and some of the remembered qualities that made him the man we were mourning. I cried like everyone in the room, but the part of my brain looking for the wires in every magic trick did wonder – how developed was the template for these videos? How often did they re-use the same music? What was the stylebook for writing about the dead?
We are always balanced on a point between what makes our life unique and what makes our lives the same. We yearn, I believe out of a dread of death, to have some control over our story, for the sake of our uniqueness in peoples’ memories, and yet we also find comfort in taking part in a culture that identifies certain shared milestones. Yes, we want to say, I too had a job and a school, and I went to Disney World as a child and isn’t this a horrible haircut that I had that year? But behind that we also must add there is MORE to me. Don’t you want to know it? I want to tell you about it.
The Timeline puts the tools in your hand to do that in a way that is, inherently, and I’ll say it, beautifully, of the Internet. But the only way Facebook can know if it has provided the right balance of structure and customizability is to have 800 million souls get at using it. This is what they are about to do.