I’ve come to the conclusion that Facebook
enjoys testing people’s comfort zones. Every time you get used to some new
change they’ve introduced, they go and spring another one on you. And you can
expect everyone to be complaining about it and threatening to leave Facebook.
Of
course they never actually do. You see, another thing I’ve realised is that resistance is
futile - and that we get over the
new changes so quickly, that it’s really not that big a deal.
So, when the latest drastic layout change
started, I still tried to avoid it for as long as I possibly could. No matter
how pretty my friends’ profiles looked with their pretty little cover photos, I
was determined to ‘protest’ and stick with the old layout.
That is until the change was forced upon me. Which meant that either I had to accept it and move on, or leave Facebook.
So, of course – I got over it. Quickly. Timeline
turned out to be kind of awesome. I ended up spending at least half an hour
going back on my timeline and enjoying a trip down memory lane – all the way
back to 2007 when I first joined Facebook and still updated my status in the
third person like a noob!
Looking over the last few years of my life on
Facebook and seeing how much I’ve grown up and changed – through my fat days
and my fit days, my longer hair and my shorter, all my old favourite outfits
that I miss – and I started wondering what it would be like to have a place
where I could see a real timeline of my entire life. Imagine if you could
go back and look at all the significant moments in your life, all the most
important things you’ve said and done. There might be a few that make you
cringe, a few that make you cry, but I think it would be pretty awesome.
I remember reading a quote once about how
Facebook is like a jail – you sit around and waste time, write on walls and get
poked by people you don’t know. Not the most tasteful quote ever, but take a
second to think about it.
Of course, everyone would be in perfect
relationships and their lives would be absolutely amazing.
And everyone would look drop-dead-gorgeous all the time.
Although, once people get annoyed or upset about things
– instead of writing about it in a diary or discussing it with close friends –
they would just walk around screaming all their frustrations at everyone around
them! Some people would constantly be letting you know what they're doing or thinking.
And on the same note, new parents would walk
up to you in the street all the time and shove their babies in your face. We’d
also have a lot more manic street preachers standing up on their soapboxes
telling the world about all their crazy opinions and grievances.
Yes, all these little things that annoy most
people on Facebook would be a whole lot more annoying in real life. But there
are also a few cool things. You can just simply ‘unfriend’ someone at the click
of a button and remove that person from your life. You can ‘hide’ some people
on your newsfeed – kind of liking muting the voice of anyone that you’re tired
of hearing from.
But if I could choose just one aspect of
Facebook to have in real life – I would want my very own Timeline – a permanent
record of my entire life that I could access at any time.
So, now that I’ve admitted my feelings for
Timeline to the interwebs, how long do you think it will be before Facebook
decides to make another radical format change?
JO WATSON PRODUCTIONS
