INDEX	February 15, 2024
The Ghosts of Fb past
The Fb memories service means your old posts come back to haunt, delight or possibly just surprise you. One aspect of this is that you get to see comments made by friends, now deceased. At the time these probably didn't mean all that much. Just the normal Fb chatter. But in retrospect these ghostly voices from the past take on a new poignancy. It makes you wonder (me at least) did this mean more than it seemed at the time? Should I have pursued this? Could I have changed the future (now the past) if I had been more sensitive? It's rather like letting a parent die without telling them you love them. Clearly it doesn't make any difference to them but it would leave you with a hollow feeling. Last night I watched the film The Social Network, about the creation of Fb. It is interesting because it portrays Harvard as a rather dumb place where famous people spend most of their time trying to stop innovation. Coming from Britain my impression is that people steal the ideas created (mainly by the post docs or staff) at universities. This is called something like privatisation. The Social Network portrays the development of Fb as a race between a rather clunky inward looking package and the Fb we have come to know and loathe (or sometimes love). This seems strange since there were many precursors to Fb (like School friends reunited, or whatever it was called). These seem to have been wiped from history.
INDEX Jonathan Brind	February 15, 2024