I know, OK? I KNOW. I know the world is full of things worth getting genuinely angry about. Hunger. Global warming. Bankers’ bonunses. The fact that the person who invented Crocs probably makes more in a month than this year’s History of Art graduates will in a lifetime. Combined. I am fully aware of this, and trust me it does make me angry.
However, there are other things. Smaller things. More insignificant things. Things that, despite not having any serious impact on your life, can send you into fits of rage so all-encompassing that you have to curl up under your desk and breathe into a paper bag for a good ten minutes to be able to move on. Things like impenetrable plastic packaging and buffering. Those things.
No, you say?
You deal with those things like a rational human being and make a conscious effort not to let it ruin entire days of your life?
Right. I guess it’s just me then.
Well, in a bid to save myself from an early grave, I have decided to write about those things. Let it all out. I see it as a mutually beneficial endeavour for any potential readers and myself. I get to not die from a rage-induced heart attack at 23 after failing to open a pack of batteries. You get a rare insight into the mind of a woman 2 minutes worth of buffering away from a minor nervous breakdown.
Starting out timely and topical (and not in any way as a desperate bid to attract a readership), I have decided to tackle something instantly familiar to anyone in the general student demographic. You guessed it; Facebook. Not Facebook as a whole however, just the utterly infuriating Timeline. If you are one of the lucky few still clinging on to the trusty old stream, cherish the coming days. By Friday, Timeline will be the Facebook norm.
I made the switch just before Christmas. Why try and ward off the inevitable, I thought. You see, I didn’t use to get angry about Facebook. It used to represent some the very few moments in my life I could tell other people to calm down. It’s just a website, I would sigh patronisingly when everyone around me was complaining about a change in the album settings or something equally inane. It made me feel mature and reasonable and wise. I don’t experience these feelings very often in my life.
But then there was Timeline. In an instant, my rare bursts of sensibility vanished as I was left glaring in disgust at my computer screen. I had turned into one of the people getting genuinely enraged by ‘just a website’. Though I see this as a personal defeat of epic proportions, that in itself is not the worst thing about Timeline.
The worst thing isn’t the oversized, always awkward and at times pretentious assault on senses otherwise known as the cover photo. Nor is it the remarkable way it makes me feel both 15 and 85 all at once. The former because of its nostalgic mid-2000s, MySpace-inspired design (I’m just waiting for the glittery fonts and embedded music player); the latter because I genuinely don’t understand how to use it (where is the latest post on my wall? Why is everything so big? WHAT IS A LIFE EVENT?) It’s not even the fact that the last remnants of my faux-alternative teen years are now easily available to all my friends due to my inability to delete or hide anything.
No, it’s the complete and utter arrogance that permeates every little feature of this latest incarnation of Facebook. “Timeline is the story of your life” – actual quote by social media overlord Mark Zuckerberg from the launch back in September.
Really?
Really?
Because last time I checked it was JUST A WEBSITE. Granted, it has gifted us with some of the finest procrastination tools known to man, and for that we are all grateful. But lets not kid ourselves, Zuckerberg. You haven’t discovered fire or invented the wheel – you haven’t even come up with an original business idea (Tylor and Cameron Winklevoss like this). You’ve essentially created a marginally more sophisticated version of Bebo.
“The biggest challenge that we had designing Timeline was figuring out a way to tell all the important stories of your life on a single page” – another genuine soundbite. You know what I do when I want to tell people the important stories of my life? I tell them. I leave my room and I interact with other human beings face to face. I’ve been known to use the phone at times as well. You know how I don’t do it? Trough the medium of a blurry, embarrassing online banner.
Yet despite all this, I won’t be logging out permanently anytime soon. I’m a third-year, with hitherto unprecedented amounts of work to avoid. I need my daily fix of the ‘book. However, though Zuckerberg may have won this battle, the war rages on. I know that with every passing day, Facebook edges ever closer to the barren wasteland of social network irrelevance. I’m happy knowing that in the long run he’ll be rubbing shoulders with MySpace-Tom and whoever it was that invented Friendster, while I’ll go back to not caring about website design. At least as long as Twitter stays as it is.