2012 : The Year In You

 The real year-end review for 2012 is a review of ourselves. And auto-nostalgia has its limits.

What had started as a cute end-of-the-year distraction for a handful of engineers and product managers has become a grave ritual commanding all the resources of a full-blown product launch, complete with all the pomp and circumstance of inspirational marketing videos: the tech company year-end review, which has reached new heights this year with Facebook, Google, and Twitter. And it's not just 2012 in the worldwide context they're reviewing: Now they're reviewing us.

Source: youtube.com

The original purpose of these year-end reviews has evolved from something like "check out what the year was like from our quirky perspective, like remember that time everybody searched for 'the Macarena' way back in March, hahaha" into a message that's far weightier: "Look at how important our service was to the world over the last year. Can you imagine what the world would be like without us? How would you even know what happened?" Seriously, watch these videos.
It's a message that also exploits the special circumstances of our moment, one in which our craving for nostalgia is so intense that we don't even wait for a second to pass — we constantly manufacture it out of the present — so zooming out to an entire year on the timeline almost feels breathtaking in scope. To that end, Facebook and Twitter, the dominant archives of our lives, have capped off the year by offering not simply year-end summations of the whole world, viewed through the billion-lensed prism of their vast data troves, but year-end reviews of ourselves. There is something appealing about the promise of this kind of easy, comprehensive, data-driven, objective analysis of ourselves and who were are, because genuine self-analysis is, like, hard. If Google is our new brain, why can't Facebook be our new psychologist?