These were one minute vignettes of selected posts and pics that were deemed the most popular, or "viewed", dating back to when we each joined the social media site.
I was moved by mine. I understand that many of us were and that some of us were even moved to tears.
None of us saw pictures or posts we'd never seen before, obviously, and yet we were still moved.
For me, it was the music.
Yes, music was a big part of it but it was also the juxtaposition of the music and the particular photos that appeared on my video which truly touched me.
For the most part, they were family-oriented and significant--pictures of our wedding, kids, and both of my parents.
These pics were already significant to me but combining them with music and streaming them through my consciousness in such a manner seemed to give them that much more significance.I guess that's what a soundtrack will do, it will provide that extra aural and emotional context to what you are seeing. How many movies can you think of that are hard to separate from the music that accompanied them? Hard to imagine such movies as Gone With The Wind, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Pink Panther, Jurassic Park, Lawrence of Arabia and Pulp Fiction without the iconic music which accompanied them. One of my all-time favourite scenes from any movie occurs during Jurassic Park, at the moment when the visitors to the island come across dinosaurs for the first time. They are brought, literally, to their knees as the scope of what they are seeing becomes apparent. At this point in the movie, John Williams' music is both soaring and majestic as man comes face-to-face with...well...history. In my mind, an indelible moment is created as much because of the music as for any other reason.
Without thinking about it too much, we took pictures. For a variety of reasons, we gathered up pictures which had already been taken. If the mood struck us, we said something that other people might have thought was pertinent, important or perhaps humourous. Singly, the significance of all these actions was possibly not obvious to us. String them together, though, and then add music and all this changes somehow.
So does the music just add emotion or does it bring out the emotion that was already intrinsically there? Does it act somehow in a similar way as alcohol, heightening the emotional intensity of a relationship to a person or event?
It's almost as if music breaks down whatever subconscious defense mechanism we've deployed to keep ourselves on the even emotional keel which gets us through our days. Throw in a little music, however, and we are emotional in a variety of ways over things which did not seem terribly momentous at the time they actually occurred.
If you are at all like me, you may have been just a touch creeped out that Facebook was even able to do these videos. I realize that none of the pictures or statuses on my Facebook page are truly private but I was trying hard to imagine that nobody was paying any attention to, or had any vested interest in, them. This seems to not be the case. In an example of marketing at its low-key best, Facebook has wormed its way into our hearts and all it took was adding a little music to the soundtrack of our life.
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