There comes a time in all of our lives when we
simply have to accept and move on. Marathon chocolate bars become Snickers,
Vanilla Coke suddenly disappears from the shelves in your home country
(seriously Ireland, not cool…) and Hotmail changes its name to Outlook years
after anyone gave a crap about it. Change is tough but it must be confronted
and in most cases, eventually accepted.
In Ireland, every child
loves getting sick because getting sick means that your parents feed you
nightly doses of Calpol medicine, specifically the purple variety. According to
the never-wrong Wikipedia, "Calpol is a common cause of accidental child
poisoning, due to its pleasant taste". I can assure you, everybody who has
ever been accidentally poisoned was having the time of his or her lives with a
purple bottle.
Unfortunately, however,
your time with the beloved purple bottle is short, with instructions that it
only be used for babies and children aged two months to six years. Once you hit
the big six it's all downhill from there, as Calpol 'SixPlus' kicks in, with its
dreaded orange bottle. Thankfully my parents loved me so I was on the purple
stuff for years after, accidental poisoning be damned.
I promise you, ask any
grown man or woman from the UK or Ireland today if they can remember the orange
Calpol and you will be confronted with a look that stretches right into the
darkest abyss of their soul and shatters your preconceptions of the human
condition. Basically, it tastes like someone rinsed a sweaty towel after peeing
on it.
Forced upon us after
years of unaware bliss, Facebook Timeline is the orange Calpol of social
networking. We can’t go back and once Facebook started spreading the word in
December 2011 that Timeline was ready to park its advertising-friendly,
eye-straining, glossy veneer upon us, we had just seven days to get ready.
Seven days to hide our most damning posts (mocking our boss, kissing the face
off our exes) from anyone who wanted to view “your life story”. I don’t know
about you but my “life story” on Facebook mostly involves postings pictures of
toasted bread that looks like celebrities, not marking real life milestones
from 10 or so years ago.
For Facebook, Timeline is
a concept that is too big at this point to fail, or perhaps it would be too
embarrassing for its reputation were it to fail. Either way, it's here to stay
and whether we like it or not, Facebook is going to ensure that we take our
medicine, even if it leaves a worse taste in our mouths than the first drop of
orange Calpol, in which we quickly realized that our innocence was lost, our
childhood had peaked and that 25 years later the local pharmacist would refuse
your please for a bottle of the purple stuff, regardless of how much you
explain it's for the “really sick kid outside”.
No comments:
Post a Comment