Faculty member and writerPaul Ford speaks to Brooke Gladstone from On the Media this weekend about Facebook and “the Epiphanator,” referencing an essay he wrote for New York Magazine.
He expresses his views on behavior that the Facebook Timeline encourages and the media industry in New York city, terming it “The Epiphenator,” a large machine manufacturing epiphanies, without a beginning or an end:
When you read a story in a magazine, it tends to have an ending. But when you check in with Facebook or Twitter on a moment by moment basis, you start to have this experience of an unfolding never-ending stream of experience. It doesn’t have an end. It doesn’t conclude. When you look at Facebook, you can actually see that they’re trying to deal with this, but they’re trying to deal with this in the way that database nerds would always deal with it, which is The Timeline. Look you made 79 friends in 2010, good for you. But that’s not really how it works. …. However hundreds of millions of people are now starting to get these stories in these streams and they’re not so worried about an end or a beginning. What they want is to have that experience and to swim in it.
