We're wrong when we describe Facebook as a social networking site. It's more like a limited version of Doctor Who's TARDIS, easily skimming through time and space. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like a London Police Call Box.
But like the TARDIS, it's bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside. To outsiders, it looks like a place to instantly communicate with friends and family, and while away idle hours playing games. But once you're inside, you find that it's somehow storing all the thoughts and memories of all its members in a vast, invisible neural network, and that makes it a time machine.
Yep. Like the TARDIS, Facebook is a time machine. When I'm inside Facebook, I see posts from highschool friends I haven't thought of in years, and the memories flood in from that time in my life, as fresh as if they had just happened. Those memories spark other memories, and I suddenly find 30 minutes have disappeared while I was searching Facebook for more names that had been buried deep in my mind, covered up by a lifetime of other names and experiences.
And like the TARDIS, Facebook travels geographically as well as temporally. A friend in the UK mentions Carlisle in a post, and suddenly it's 1997, and I'm driving the twisty roads of Northumbria, following Hadrian's Wall. Or motoring farther north alongside the lochs later that same day, the ever-present Scottish rain dotting my windshield.
Yes, photo albums could do the same thing, but they're not dynamic (and mine are still in a box from my move 3+ years ago). On Facebook, when memories flood my brain, I can reply to the post that sparked the memory flood, or start someone else's memory flood with a post on their wall.
So next time you login to your Facebook account, keep watch out of the corner of your eye. You might just spot a TimeLord lurking nearby. If you do wind up on an unscheduled trip through time and space, enjoy the ride. I know I always do.
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