In praise of lost time: on Facebook Timeline

Facebook are creating a machine for capturing the familiar everyday, but should we always remember everything?

Ed. This is the original, and different, version of an article published in Domus on March 5, 2012, for the SuperNormal column I curated at the time.

For millennia, humans have pursued the idea of perfect memory. It’s an ambition that has led to the development of much of our media, from books to the internet. For most of our existence, however, ‘forgetting’ has been the default, and ‘remembering’ the exception.

Yet when Facebook Timeline launched in December 2011, it was with the promise of “the feeling of telling someone your life story, and the feeling of memory — of remembering your own life.” As ambitious as this sounds, Timeline was simply the latest attempt at a digital memory that can augment our frail biological memories and supersede our various analogue records. This ‘outboard memory’ has been a theme in computer science since the discipline fully emerged after World War II, yet in pre-digital form the pursuit arguably stretches back to Ptolemy and the great library at Alexandria.

Of course Facebook Timeline is not quite there. While Timeline really only ‘remembers’ your activity in social media…