Socialising our past
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I know people who in the last week have deleted, or considered deleting their Facebook account. This is nothing new, the constant panic about privacy and frustration with every new feature has become run of the mill, but these people weren’t deleting their data because it was failing in what they thought it should offer – but rather that it was succeeding too well.
“Wake up – time to die”
I’m referring specifically to Timeline, the new Facebook view that replaces that of the traditional wall of your profile. In reality, it acts in much the same way, but one key factor is that it allows instant and fascinating travel through your personal Facebook history, and this is why the people I’ve mentioned want out: they don’t want to remember.
For the sake of anonymity, Subject X described her motivation thusly:
“I just wasn’t even with [sic] me accessing 5 years of my life in photos, let alone anyone else. some things better off forgotten”
The thing that surprises me, is that while I won’t be following Subject X’s direction, is that I can totally understand the logic.
This is where I feel to get to the heart of how I feel about this I need to get a bit personal, so bear with me here. This year I broke up with my very long term partner – it was messy and awful, as these things often are, but now months later life has resumed it’s, albeit altered, usual cadences.
However, when I activated the preview of Timeline on my account a few weeks ago, what greeted me were hundreds of photos, updates, events and details of that relationship, as if preserved in Facebook Blue amber.
It’s not that that data wasn’t always there – it was – it’s just that the old method of even scrolling way back in the photos you were tagged in over five years ago was clunky and didn’t lend itself to exploration. With Timeline you simply click the year from the displayed dates to the right of your stream to be catapulted back into your personal history, and in my case, a world you shared with another person. A world that no longer exists.
But it wasn’t just her.
Stegosaurus confirmed you as a friend on Facebook!
“It’s just about some distance between those memories” – Subject X
Amongst the photos of me, happy and smiling, with my arms wrapped around my ex, were photos, posts and conversations with people I haven’t seen in a long time. Some which ended abruptly and with anger, and some from whom I simply drifted apart, but there were patterns.
A mass extinction event is “a sharp decrease in the diversity and abundance of macroscopic life. They occur when the rate of extinction increases with respect to the rate of speciation.” (Thanks Wikipedia.)
As I looked through my timeline I saw these rises and falls – the times when starting a new part of my life, moving or university etc, introduced lots of new people into my friend ecosystem, and the points where, like the dinosaur’s meteor, lots was wiped out.
- ● My friends from High School – my closest mates, David, Alex, Scott, Lauren and Jess, along with the other group I hung out with, including Chris, Simone, Jess and Zoe… BOOM. High School ends, we go to different Unis, and I’m the only one who moves out to Sydney.
- ● The people I lived with in Uni housing, notably James, Daniel, Kaz and Maria… KABOOM, I moved out and lost contact.
- ● My University gang – yet another David, another Chris, Bronwyn, Ethan, Tim, Kirill… SMASH. A grant David, Chris and I got for project causes tension, amped up by the fact we live and run clubs together, and the ecosystem collapses. Still one of my few big regrets in life.
- ● My old job as a journalist, with Adam, Marta, Mark, Chris (the same one from Uni, again) and Ernest… BAM. I moved on to pursue my dream career in social media.
…and those are just the big, notable collapses. Others, ex-housemates, friends from other jobs over the years, a couple, whom I loved dearly, that separated and ran away in different directions across the country, the team from my old agency (especially Sarah, Lucie, Kylie and Shane) and more until the big one:
- ● Living with my partner, in a sharehouse, with a large, close network of mutual friends… BOOM. We break up, I move out, and I find a bunch of the people I counted as friends didn’t even find out how I was, for the months where I lived off couches and barely registered the world around me.
Get to the point, Lachlan
Why am I being so open about all this? Because this is what the current trends in social media are leading us towards. Being able to see how people ebb and flow between social circles and cities, how relationships come together and explode apart, and having a front row seat for both the good times and the bad.
I’m not sure this is such a good thing though. While I miss all the people mentioned above and wish they were all in my life more, this is the natural order of things. Sure, many of those mass social extinction events were scary or sad, even the latest one, the worst by far, sets me up for new experiences and discoveries I wouldn’t have made otherwise.
Social networks however are static, trapping your connection to people with constant bonds. To use Facebook a the perfect example, how many people would actually remove a friend from Facebook simple because you’ve drifted apart? Sure, some would, but most wouldn’t – the removing of a friend isn’t simply an acknowledgement in this landscape, but a rejection.
Instead, we need social networks that reflect this – Facebook tries with its Edgerank algorithm for rating content that interests you (taking into account how often you interact with someone hence why the less you reply to someone the less likely you are to see their updates) and Google+ comes a bit of the way with Circles, none of them seem to be elegant enough to truly reflect how human relationships wax and wane.
I don’t want to forget anything that’s happened to me over the years – the good or the bad – because all of it has gone towards making me who I am today. You can’t escape your past, only embrace it, but while I love the way Facebook’s Timeline allows me to explore this at ease, I think we still have a way to go until we get it right.
I want to maintain connections with those from my past, so that I can drop them a line to catch up in the future, and I don’t want to lose all the history that lead me to this point in life, but that’s not how we think about our past. We compartmentalise our timelines, into our High School years, University days, old jobs, countries, relationship and different lives, to access when we choose to or when life reminds us.
Like Subject X mentions, it’s about putting distance between yourself and your past because while what’s happened is important the person you were then isn’t the person you are now, and the immediacy of Timeline no doubts makes some people feel that’s what it does imply.
So, I have a lot of questions. What’s the answer?
