In the 15 years since Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room, the social media app has changed how people around the world interact with friends, run businesses, sell things, and keep track of their own memories.
Although most people tend to think of the social networking site as merely a way to grow and expand current relationships, it also functions as a repository of photos, milestones, and publicly posted thoughts.
Taken together, those pictures from a family trip, the invitation to the college party where you met your spouse, birthday messages from long-lost friends, and graduation photos, along with an avalanche of other information, offer an archive of your life stored forever on the Internet.
Some of this information is fun. Facebook gets this, and programs such as Timehop offer notifications linking to old posts and prompting users to share them. Other uses of the data are, however, less fun. As colleges and parents warn soon-to-be graduates, old pictures might cost you that job you really wanted or someday mean the difference between party backing and a one-way trip to the political guillotine.
Combing back through old posts isn’t just a good way to cull unprofessional details and review photos that have become more embarrassing than cute. It’s also a chance to use the network to look beyond the glossy highlights of everyone else’s lives and instead become more familiar with your own. Those old memories are a window into your past, prompting insights, recollections, and perhaps a phone call to an old best friend that you’ve been meaning to call.
Facebook, although a social platform, was, after all, built on profiles, which were always an individual project. Take advantage of what you shared. It’s yours.
