Captive on the Carousel of Facebook Timeline

Facebook Timeline is the digital equivalent of the old-fashioned slide carousel: Packed with emotional impact. It reminds me of the famous slide carousel scene at the end of the first season of "Mad Men" in how it evokes emotions, revives memories and stokes nostalgia for long-passed and fleeting moments of our online and offline lives:

In Don Draper's words:

"Nostalgia – it's delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, "nostalgia" literally means "the pain from an old wound." It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards...it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It let's us travel the way a child travels – around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved."

It is also the prophetic progenitor of Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence or Pixar's Wall-E: Imagine future generations of your family stumbling across your Facebook Timeline, disengaged from the real you by many years. Their glimpse of your visual scrapbook will be the only perspective they have of you: Your milestones, your conversations, your interactions with your Facebook friends. A very biased view, to be sure, because many critical pieces will be missing. But very convincing for somebody in the future, who may have no other reference back to your life.

Source article: I Love Facebook Timeline