I’m sitting here testing out Facebook’s new timeline feature, and a couple things jump out at me:
1. For a platform that has, for years now, promoted a false sense of ephemerality in order (I’m assuming) to get us to share more, they are now actively trying to reinvent themselves as a personal narrative platform (think 21st century version of the family album or scrapbook) as opposed to a serialized communication platform where you don’t worry about what you posted 5 years ago having an impact on how people perceive you now.
2. Towards this end, the timeline’s UI asks us to participate in life annotation by highlighting certain posts, photos, etc. as well as actively choosing to annotate particular life events in our past. (I include screenshots of suggested life-events in a follow up post here.) The emphasis here is decidedly on human-annotation as oppose to algorithmic analysis, which is somewhat surprising considering the extent to which algorithmic analysis of our data figures in Facebook’s business model. I’m guessing they have killer data visualizations available but they’re keeping them behind the curtain. It would be interesting, for example, to be able to see posts that achieved “top story” status graphed on a timeline, or even to see how different kinds of user-activity have ebbed and flowed over time. When do I spend most time uploading photos, for example, vs. doing other sorts of activities? How has this distribution evolved? I would also love to be able to see general data on how much time I’ve spent on Facebook at different periods in my life. Can you imagine a visual representation of your last 6 years of procrastination? Scary! There are reasons why revealing this kind of activity (even if it’s private) might be detrimental to Facebook’s business model because it helps us to see ourselves as marketing agencies see us. But, it’s not clear yet whether this emphasis on human-annotation vs. algorithmic analysis is just a matter of developers wanting to grab low hanging fruit for the beta version or whether Facebook plans to actively encourage us to think of timeline as something human rather than machine authored.
Hi Joshua,
It seems to me that the timeline introduces a concept of storytelling to the identity performance that fb has always required of its users. I think you can situate the timeline within a larger trend of narrative computing. Are you familiar with http://www.qwiki.com/q/Qwiki ? They say they’re planning on allowing people to connect qwiki to their facebook and linkin profiles to create short narrative presentation about themselves. I agree that initially it seems to be at odds with the “ephemerality ” of fb, but as you say it’s a false sense to begin with. It’s interesting that for sometime now many artists have framed their work within the context personal narrative, often blurring the distinction between the ‘work’ and the story or the ‘process’. I often view my own creative efforts in this way. It seems to be a strategie that is becoming quite common… I suspect it should be discussed in terms of social capital. Anyways, I’m definitely enjoying your posts, especially the next post where you highlight the various options facebook offers. Whenever I have one too many drinks at a party, I start to dive into a rant about how facebook’s formal-technical definitions of friendship are reshaping our very notion of friendship. I imagine you might already come across it, but if not I’ve really enjoyed the software studies book http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/0262062747intro1.pdf Warren Sack has an essay in it, I’m not sure if you studied with Warren during your time at DANM but while I was there he held a software studies seminar that was great fun, I think the seminar website is still online with some interesting essays that might be good readings for the critique you’re building. Cheers -D