Who said Facebook was useless?

Has it ever occurred to you that your grandchildren might just ‘stumble upon’ your abandoned Facebook page if you forget to delete it? And that they might as well just find pictures of you partying hard (while you still could) when you were a young and sexy student? These pictures don’t get old. They don’t get yellow and dusty like your grandparents or parents’ pictures. Our generation, one of botox-filled cheekbones and unaccepted consequences of ageing, is also the victim of a new technology which immortalises your life, regardless of spatial and temporal circumstances. Virtual immortality. Now that’s a scary thought. Your life is owned by that strange thing called the internet. Or at least the memory of it.

How cool is it to be able to see pictures of last night’s bar crawl or your cousin’s birthday a 1,000 miles away? But that’s in the short term. Think long-term.

Think about how these pictures just won’t disappear. Perhaps the web is not a suitable place for personal information. What if death falls upon you with no one capable of deleting your accounts and personal information because your password is now with you in your tomb? Haunting thought.
This presents an image of the internet that would constitute a valuable justification to quit using it. But there is still so much that we would miss out on. Of course browsing through search engines for information does sound way cooler than the weariness of skimming pages of a dusty encyclopaedia in your granny’s study. But this is, thankfully, not the only thing the internet should be praised for.

Whatever the reasons for what is happening in the Arab world, no doubt the web – and Facebook in particular – has a fair share of responsibility for it. The ‘2.0 revolution’ just gave the internet more credit than it had accumulated throughout the years since its invention. Facebook and virtual communications, if they will timelessly keep your toothy smile of your 20s, are also the delicate finger tip that knocked over the first domino (i.e. Tunisia) of the Arab domino chain. Who would have thought that history could be written on the web?

There is an interesting prospect with that: instead of having authors producing pieces of work in which they offer a unique perspective on a past historical event, the primary sources of history can now be found on the web itself, accessible to all. The revolutionary groups and protests organised by these means are to stay on the web for us all to remember this specific moment, and that won’t get old either.

But that still doesn’t make the internet the cleanest tool in the shed. After all, this ‘place’ which still seems like something we do not control, is a dump where anyone can toss anything and it will stay there, just floating around. Although it does look more encouraging, the result of browsing for information on search engines will never be as reliable as your beloved granny’s dusty books.

Despite all this, we should think of what is happening today as truly revolutionary: not only for the populations toppling deep-seated regimes, but also for the simple fact that history can now be written through new means. And that’s something that’ll decorate the history textbooks of your grandchildren. Or their iPads, or whatever comes next.