Great news! Facebook has tapped into the collective consciousness and has developed a feature page, 'See your 2012 year in review' - a page that serves no other purpose than to trigger forgotten memories and to nostalgically look back at an image history of you and your whereabouts. The brutal truth is that, people only ever want to see their own year in review - and even then, I can't say I'm that interested in my life according to Facebook.
It's stunts like this that make you painstakingly self-reflect on how much data you feed into social media. Facebook is cleverly disguised as an important, for some, a crucial social artery in keeping up appearances, all the time, Facebook is calculating stats, working out user behaviour and tuning into your mind and how it operates.
Pages like this also seem to celebrate the modern era of self-obsession in the digital world, how do people see you as you appear on an online profile? It is only all the monumentally great things that have happened in someone's life seem to get proudly shared on the Facebook timeline. Smug holiday-goers, lucky casino wins, dreary hangovers at the cost of a great night, even pancakes for breakfast.. all these events which are supposed to portray your life as great...according to Facebook.
Most recent posts that made it to the fantastic year of 2012 was that I had changed my cover photo, pretty monumental but will leave that one out of the annual family update. Facebook LOVES a life milestone, job, wedding, pregnancy, engagement, are all hot topics and will inevitably feature on your page if you've been loosely affected by any of these. On the flipside, does divorce, unemployment and death feature? Facebook knows everything, right? All in all, I had about 15 monumental stories based on stories which had the most friend interaction, which has barely scratched upon the surface of how great/bad/mediocre my year was. The conclusion with most things Facebook related is to not be petrified when it throws up a whole page dedicated to your social calendar of 2012. Although Michael Aspel may not be there to present it to you in a book form, Facebook does like to commemorate the things you often forget.
