Back with a vengeance

This post's title refers to two things- the first is the activity of this blog, which as Gandalf Greyhame might say on entering unto it, "is somewhat lessened of late"; the second is the all-consuming, omniscient latching-on capabilities of Hell's Eyeballs, formally known as Facebook. Recent developments, changes and releases have changed the site. As users for many years, the vast majority of us shouldn't be and probably aren't alarmed or even surprised that these changes have taken effect. And why should we be? The site has been undergoing unannounced changes since it's popularity made it what it is, and it's not as if the Timeline feature wasn't announced. But should we worry? It's now possible, for the first time ever, to stalk people more effectively than ever before.

If you want to know anything about that girl you've watched from behind your cubicle partition in the office, that man who's always been cooler than you to the point where you've not plucked up the courage to be his mate or your current/ex- girlfriend/boss depending on where your intimacy boundaries lie in the workplace, you can.

Introducing new Timeline, the all-new system from Facebook!

Want to uncover the appalling turn of phrase which can be interpreted as racist if the sarcasm is ignored because it's typed, uttered by your squeeze in May '08? You can!

Need to remind yourself of that photo? Just scroll on down to August '07 and see it in full dual-glory until we sort out the kinks that mean it shows up side by side, on in each column.

Want to get the inside scoop on friends and acquaintances from school and uni that had until now been unreachable and, because the all-seeing site hadn't presented many facts about them to you personally, boring? Go ahead, pick up the scoop and haul it through the ice-cream of their life at will, dragging backwards in time to find globules of cherry sauce, fragments of pure ice, air pockets and temporarily straying into the carrot cake mentality!

All because of Timeline, the handy little stalker-encouragement and heavy-breather-training system courtesy of Facebook! Need to brief a government agent on someone? Check the target's timeline. Want surveillance of a suspected cheating cad's movements? Check their timeline. Want to know when they wiped their arse with the greaseproof paper on a roll which that restuarant flaunts in it's loos as a violation of human rights three years, four months and eight days ago? Check their god-damned timeline.

Now I'm not really one to halt change, I tend to begrudgingly accept it after a while or greet it with excitement intense enough to make people doubt if I'm clean. But do we need a record of everything anyone does to be so immaculate, so complete and accessible? This vertical scrolling record of existence can only end badly if the concept reaches it's natural, progressive conclusion. Facebook's power over us, perhaps forgotten in recent times (particularly the last year and a half, with the more sinister Google Street View, etc being in the spotlight) has returned ten-fold, with the revelation that when they said they were keeping everything on us, every wayward slip of the tongue or rough photo of dodgy facial expressions the afternoon after the weekend a week before, they had actually kept it all and were about to wheel it out, to the point where we had joined THE COLLECTIVE, or before that if you counted that it gave you the information fed into it, along with the silhouette of an extremely cold or Na'vi baby to note the event, the sole event in the internet's eyes that is worth remembering from before any use of the Book of Faces.

I don't want such a permanent record of my life to be so publicly available, on a purely personal note. Plus, I don't want everyone else's activity to be so readily at hand to be laid bare to me on a whim. That's how the internet is built- let any resistance down for a second and you're hooked. For a person as curious and with as varied a strength of self-control as me, it's a slippery slope between checking up on a good friend and tracing, through some wayward comment on said mutual friend's photo or wall, an acquaintance's actions, dating, party attendance and successive driving test failures for the whole of last year. If you get pulled into one of these stints, as I did the other day killing time on other people's public diaries of meaninglessness, once you get out if you get out you feel slightly guilty, subversive, perverse. No one should have all of that information so ready to judge, live vicariously through, plant jealousy in your heart or be invaded by nosy people who want to read conversations with a third party they've never met.

It's like watching one cat video on YouTube and by a single degree of separation being shown Socks' or Whiskers' entire mouse-raiding, private-bit-licking existence. Here's a thought, though. For a website with so many walls, I've never known anything to so completely and blatantly laugh at and remove boundaries to the point where we accept it as much as Facebook has, does, and will do to a greater extent in future.