Facebook Look Back: Nostalgia gone viral

Facebook's new Look Back feature has covered newsfeeds with minute-long videos that chronicle users' social media life. But some factors indicate this feature may have staying power past its fifteen-seconds of Internet fame.

|
Facebook
A screenshot of Mark Zuckerberg's Look Back video, a Facebook-generated minute-long video that chronicles Facebook users' experience on the site.

Nostalgia has gone viral.

Facebook rolled out a feature called “Facebook Look Back” to celebrate the site’s 10th anniversary. Facebook Look Back is a 62-second video that creates a montage of your most notable moments shared on Facebook, set to inspirational music, capped with a thank you message from Facebook for using the site. Though Facebook newsfeeds were almost as full of people complaining about the pervasiveness of the feature as users' minute-long videos, early reports indicate this could actually become a more permanent feature of Facebook’s website.

Here’s how it works. Get the Look Back link (either here or through any of your Facebook friends’ videos) and your video will automatically pop up. The video takes you through the highlights of your existence on Facebook from your first few uploads to particularly notable updates (likely measured by likes, shares, and/or comments), and ends with a signature ‘thumbs up’ icon, signed from “Mark and the Facebook team”.

Mark Zuckerberg’s video, for example, includes pictures of his undergraduate days at Harvard, his characteristic Adidas sandals, and the Facebook status update celebrating the site’s 10th birthday.

The quick-hit reminiscing rapidly spread on Facebook over the past few days, and as with any viral content, drew as much complaining as sharing. Users took to Facebook and Twitter to complain of Look Back-saturated newsfeeds. Huffington Post Tech blogger Alexis Kleinman wrote a post called “Nobody Wants To See Your Facebook Look Back Video” that garnered more than 9,000 Facebook shares by Thursday morning.

The post also inspired joke videos, such as this Rob Ford Look Back parody video that chronicles some of Mr. Ford’s most cringeworthy moments, and the Orlando Sentinel’s rendering of what Tim Tebow’s ascension to football royalty (and subsequent fall) would look like through the Look Back video.

Look Back also brought up an unexpected debate about the service: what rights do family members have over a deceased relative’s social media content?

John Berlin of St. Louis, Mo., uploaded a video to YouTube on February 5 asking Facebook if he could see his deceased son’s Look Back video. Though his son died two years ago, he had been unable to access the account despite talking with people from Facebook, he says, and he asked the site if he could put one together for his son.

Facebook’s current policy says only living members of Facebook are able to access their accounts, unless there is written documentation and instructions for the account from the deceased person. Though after a verification process, family members can request the account be taken down.

However, Facebook found out about Mr. Berlin's request, and news outlets reported that Facebook put together his son’s video Wednesday night.

Though a minute-long video may not seem to warrant this much hullabaloo, it looks as if Facebook may actually make this a more permanent part of its service. As of Thursday morning, “Look Back” was a tab on Facebook’s help section, that included instructions for putting the video together, as well as editing the video (though as of Thursday, the edit feature was not yet functioning). Facebook told Tech Crunch that the feature will be available soon.

“We will be launching an Edit feature soon that will allow people to change moments in their movies or update the ones they shared," says a Facebook representative. "I don’t have exact timing at the moment, but this will enable people to remove a post from the movie that was pre-selected and change it to a different one.”

So if you don’t think Facebook accurately summed up your social media experience, you can tweak it to show off your best online moments.

Facebook also uses this “Look Back” help tab to demonstrate its privacy policies, which have morphed over the past year to encourage more individual control over the publicity of each post. 

"Keep in mind that if your movie includes things you only shared with a few people, the people you share your movie with will now be able to see everything you included in your movie," says the site. "You can edit your movie to adjust what’s included, and select the audience you share it with. If you change your mind about who you would like to share your movie with, you can change the audience from your activity log."

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Facebook Look Back: Nostalgia gone viral
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2014/0206/Facebook-Look-Back-Nostalgia-gone-viral
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe