Mark Zuckerberg and Me - Day 7- Minden

Earlier this week I commented on a friend’s Facebook posting of a link to a CNN newsclip. You’ll freak when you see the new Facebook is a short piece featuring Mark Zuckerberg’s summary of the soon to be sprung upon us Timeline.

I watched the piece and quickly responded:“Ick.”

My friend who happened to be online at the time fired back: “Luddite”.

Back to me, I wrote: “Is that the best you can do?”

...deleted it and finished with: “Cyberbully.”

Timeline is a reshuffling of “the heart of your Facebook experience, the profile. Your profile page will become a scrapbook of your life, all the way back to your birth. Timeline is the story of your life, all the stories, all the apps, a new way to express who you are.”

I laughed aloud yesterday, pondering this breaking news as I read and sorted recent submissions: a shopping bag full of letters dating from the early 40s and a stack of letters from a genealogist.

Hey Mark...hate to tell you—it's been done! Okay, so it’s not all on one page, but really,” the whole story of your life on a single page” how good of a read could that be?  

The good news for those of you with a hatbox, a shopping bag or a stack of letters stashed somewhere, is that you’ve already got Timeline. 

I’ve sorted the letters in Adult Non Fiction 340 (see Day Two) into themes using the categories established for the rest of the collection, but I have organized the letters from the shopping bag chronologically. Both from her, to her and about her, Jeannie's letters convey: 

a little girl in boarding school;

a young woman (the summer of 48 seems to have been busy);

a granddaughter;

 young wife;

daughter;

mother;

 and friend.

Her most recent letter is dated the spring of 2011. She is likely to do her part to keep the genre thriving for a good long while; Jeannie makes 80 look like the new 40!

The conversations I’ve had with members of the Haliburton Highlands Genealogy Group together with the rich family and regional histories detailed in the letters they’ve brought really drive home that the story of your life starts long before birth. And you certainly can’t curate it. I wish I had more room to recount them here. Perhaps I should consider a book? I’ll call it Voices at Handbook. How’s that Mark?

Incidentally my friend isn’t a cyberbully. And while I’m not particularly tech savvy, I’m no Luddite:  Wish I could stop jumping when a cell phone rings though!      

P.S. I’ll be returning to town to strike the installation early this week; Minden Summary to follow soon.