“If you stop using Facebook but keep your profile or download it, years down the road, you will have access to a complex digital diary of your young adult life: what you did, what you looked like, who you were friends with and, yes, even those Instagrammed photos of what you ate for dinner.” —Zoë DiGiorgio
My parents were in high school only a few decades before I was, but we often note just how different our generations are. They didn’t have cellphones. I didn’t have big, feathered hair. I got my license later than they did. We all loved The Who and Queen. (Good taste is genetic, I suppose.) But the most surprising difference between us?
I never bought a single yearbook from high school.
It’s a subtle difference, but the reasoning behind it is a clear indicator of the difference between our times. I didn’t want a yearbook because I didn’t need a big hulking tome of photo paper to remind me of my high school years; I had a Facebook.
While the yearbooks had only two or three pictures actually depicting my face, Facebook has hundreds of photos all featuring me: me with my friends at school dances, me and my friends at sleepovers, me with my cousins on Christmas Eve. Unlike my high school yearbook, Facebook became the best summary of my friendships and experiences in high school.
As a shutterbug, I liked that I had control over creating my memories; rather than having a group of individuals I didn’t even know creating the yearbook, my friends and I had our cameras ready at every social event.
Though news reports claim people are rapidly jumping ship from Facebook, it’s important for me to keep my page. Instead of awkward photos of my friends and classmates posing in front of a sterile, blue backdrop, my high school friends and I created a collection of photos all our own online. I actually have sentimental attachment to these photos on Facebook, unlike the hundreds of pictures of the yearbook staff members and their friends.
Facebook’s look-back video unearthed my old photos from freshman orientation in high school, back in fall 2007 when I first got my Facebook profile at the urging of my peers. It was strange seeing photos from more than seven years ago but not much stranger than flipping through an old yearbook.
What was more bizarre, however, was unearthing my old Myspace page over winter break. On a whim, I decided to punch in my old email and password on the new Myspace, and, lo and behold, it still worked. Though the format of the site had changed, it had preserved all the old photos I had uploaded since my friends made me a MySpace in the winter of my 8th grade year — even the pet photos I thought I had lost when my family’s computer crashed back in 2006.
Revisiting Myspace helped me realize that though the Internet has replaced my yearbook, it provides some interesting services traditional yearbooks can’t. In addition to being an accumulation of all your old pictures, it is also a collection of your daily thoughts and conversations with friends, even if you haven’t spoken to them in years.
If you stop using Facebook but keep your profile or download it, years down the road, you will have access to a complex digital diary of your young adult life: what you did, what you looked like, who you were friends with and, yes, even those Instagrammed photos of what you ate for dinner.
Though it is easy to be jaded and annoyed by the sheer volume of obnoxious opinions and sorority photos shared by your classmates at this university, keep your Facebook when you graduate college.
You’ll have something amazing to look back on.
[ READ MORE: Changing with the times: A look at how Facebook and its users have evolved ]
