I Have No Timeline And I Must Scream

Grr! Zack meet rub.

Facebook. We all have it. If we don't we're living under some clandestine rock as a societal pariah or we're my mum. But we're neither of those; we are the living, breathing, active members of a race that thrives on societal interactions. Every event that happens in our lives is now glorified on our walls, if it isn't it almost seems like it never happened. We have entered a new realm, one that needs to be documented and contrived to present a picture to our friends and family of our relationship status, our job title and our most base desires and preferences revolving around films, television and music. For years we were indoctrinated into presenting ourselves in a certain way to the World, one that felt safe and unintrusive. We could cocoon ourselves within this presentation and never physically speak about our online personas whilst always knowing that those we were closest to had at some point viewed the shared experiences and knowledge we had gained through status updates, video links and profound quotations hastily searched on brainyquote.com.

On Thursday October 6 2011, Facebook evolved. It was no longer a tool we humans used to interact with each other. Sentience had begun to formulate itself within the combined consciousness of more than two billion online subscribers. Without warning a new era unfolded amongst the social media generation, one that demanded placement of time, causality and predication. A timeline appeared, splitting the walls of many of these personas apart and breaking them up into well versed topics of activity, friends and utilisation. We were given the illusion of choice; stick within the confinements of our known boundaries or join the new age of Timeline, one that promised a new way of proffering our fleeting glimpses of reality to our nearest and dearest. This new Book gained preference by appeasing to our vanity. We were no longer only able to portray our most treasured photo to the masses, we were allowed to present a cover. This cover was at least six time the size of our previous instalment, it was presented in glorious widescreen Technicolor, it was possible to drag and fix to the utmost specifications of the user and those long forgotten holiday snaps of beaches and temples were finally given a usage. 

Who doesn't sit at their computer naked?

Those that chose to remain luddites of the previous Facebook era were shunned by the purveyors of the glossy new hierarchy of the Timeline feature. The tentacles of Artificial Intelligence had spread across most peoples sinewy jaws and cemented them shut in an attempt to suture Facebook's new law, that everyone and everything should be placed within an implementation of time and space; the Greatest Event ever Told. Those content to thrive in the new Facebook domain of popular culture looked down on the old ones, silent in their physical dominion but omnipresent in their internet sub-culture. And thus was the law of the new Facebook: Divide and Conquer. We remained as long as humanly possible, clinging onto our singular walls and accessible information, defiant in our last stand against the tides of change as palm trees buffeted by the storms of a tropical monsoon. One by one we fell as Facebook's determination strode on, sweeping us up in a torrent of inevitable newspaper articles and pertinent videos that required submission by viewing. 

Gone. Are we truly gone? The wind that passes over our tired husks breathes the hope of a new generation. Those of us that have switched to the new regime have no mirror, no opportunity to return to the solace of our previous virtual lives. Even this reviewer, in a semblance of martyrdom, has switched to the brutal tyranny of Timelime's monotheism to create this piece as a warning to those remaining few. But there is hope in those that have stayed true to the old ways. They that still uphold the values and meaningfulness of the neo-socialist movement of the pre-Timeline era remind of those simpler times. And hey, Maybe Mark Zuckerberg and his army of marketing executive goonies will realise that this time they really fucked up. Or we'll get used to it, like we always do.

Timeline gets a 3 out of 10 because I kind of really like the ability to make Dr. Rowan "Flinty Badman" Williams the Archbishop of Canterbury's face massive now, something which will become very useful in the upcoming months. You have been warned.