2. Social Media As Life Archiving

I am a Facebook loser. I only have 369 friends. My sister, despite being five years younger than me, has 722 more friends than me. I blame this on the fact that, over my 25 years, I have spent an inordinate amount of time sitting alone in my room reading or writing or listening to music rather than going out into the world and meeting people. Please don't worry about me, though, I'm content with my lot. We can't all be thousand friend superstars and as a result of my years of solitary confinement, I have gained a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the works of Douglas Adams and the ability to tell you which album any given Toad the Wet Sprocket song comes from in three notes or less. I'm assuming these abilities will pay dividends for me sometime in the future, although I admit that it is unlikely.


The fact that I have yet to amass a large quantity of friends on Facebook is perhaps made worse by the fact that I've been on it for quite some time. Since 2004, to be exact. When I first joined up, Facebook was still cordoned off by college and I had to type "www.thefacebook.com" in my browser to reach it. In the space between then and now, Facebook has changed quite a bit, but then again, so I have I. I guess you could say that Facebook and I have grown up together.

And that's a little weird when you really start to think about it. I've never deleted a wall post on my Facebook wall, so everything that everybody has ever written on it is still on my profile. This means that you can get a pretty accurate view of who my friends were, what was important to us, and what we did together over the past five years just by viewing my archived wall posts. But it doesn't end there. When Facebook introduced its news feed in September 2006, all of one's Facebooking activity began to be posted to that person's wall. So now, if you were so inclined, you could go to my profile and see when I became friends with certain people, what events I attended with them, and even what we thought and felt before and after those events. If I was the type of person who filled out those "20 things about you questionnaires", you'd be able to get detailed lists of how I thought and felt about certain things. If I filled out multiple questionnaires and quizzes, you'd get an idea of how my thoughts and feelings changed over time.

That's an awful lot of data! And to think, I've only got 369 friends. Consider an acquaintance of mine with 2,255 friends. Since she has over six times as many friends as me, then she probably has over six times as many wall posts. If she has six times the wall posts that I have, then there is six times the data about her on Facebook than there is about me. I don't know what six times "an awful amount of data" is, but I'm sure it's a lot.

And as I said before, I've been on Facebook for a long time. It was created in the fall of 2003 for Harvard students and I joined in 2004. I've been on Facebook for almost as long as someone who went to college at the University of Georgia can be on Facebook. Of course, the five year span that I've been a member comprises only 20% of my actual life, so in that sense, I guess I haven't been on that long at all.

Currently, one must be at least 13 years of age to obtain a facebook profile. Facebook launched its high school version in 2005, so as it stands now, no one can have more than 23.5% of their life recorded on it.* Of course, there are ways to circumvent this age restriction. As a matter of fact, a British survey concluded that "nearly a quarter of children between the ages of 8 and 12 are evading age restrictions imposed by . . . Facebook." So, there could be a person who joined Facebook in 2005 at the age of eight and currently has a full 1/3 of his life documented on the site. If that eight year old somehow obtained a .edu email address in 2004, he could've joined a year earlier and have a full 41.7% of his life available online.

But it doesn't end there. Some of my Facebook friends have had children. Some of these child-bearing Facebook friends have put pictures of their children on Facebook. I can think of one Facebook friend that I have who put delivery room pictures of his child on Facebook. This means that even though this child does not have a Facebook profile of his own, 100% of his life** has been documented on Facebook.

Think about such a "Facebook Baby" for a moment. Imagine that his parents continued to update their friends on their their son's life by continuing to post things about him. You might get a video of his first steps, a wall post of his first words, or a photo album from the first time he played in the snow. From status updates and profiles, you can get an idea of how his parents and extended family (a child's main social group) felt and behaved during the Facebook Baby's childhood. You can get a list of where his parents lived and worked and vacationed over his childhood. Once the child was old enough to lie about his age, he'd get his own profile, and start doing the documenting himself.

What makes a person other than the sum of their genetics, environmental factors, and personal experiences? All of these are thrown into a black box and then a person comes out of the other side. If a Facebook Baby spent 100% of his life as an active user of Facebook, and he never deleted anything, then anybody who had access to his profile would have a really good idea of two-thirds of the things that go into his black box. For that matter, you'd also be able to get a halfway decent idea of the third component (genetics) by studying his parents' profiles.

I'd argue that the bytes and circuits that make up this hypothetical Facebook Baby's profile are a more accurate representation of that person than the blood and guts body that that person inhabits. If I met this Facebook Baby in real life, I'd just be getting a snapshot of who he is at a very brief moment in time. If I study his profile, I can get a sense of who he has been over the entire course of his life and how he arrived at the snapshot that I see today. I would argue further that studying such a Facebook profile would give you a better idea of who this Facebook Baby is than knowing him his entire life. Our memories are faulty, a written historical record is not. I would finally argue that Facebook would know this Facebook Baby better than he knows even himself. Facebook has unfettered access to our past, when we try to access the past in our own minds, everything is clouded by insecurities and biases. Complete profiles covering 100% of a person's life are coming. Social networking media is relatively new and our lives are becoming more entwined with it, not less.

Of course, none of this is particularly new. A traditional scrapbook is nothing more than an early version of Facebook, and both of them are nothing more than primitive time machines. Thumbing through a book full of pictures and mementos jars our brains out of the present and enables them to better commune with the past. Facebook is merely the greatest time machine ever invented. Now, instead of looking at just pictures and videos from the past, they are accompanied by our thoughts, feelings, and ideas from the past. Instead of just viewing these pictures and videos by themselves, we view them in the context of romantic relationships, jobs we may have had, and social causes and ideas we supported.

Using Facebook in this way is hard to do now because everything is spread out all over the site because for the most part, we view Facebook as something existing in the present. We construct our profiles to reflect who we are, not who we've been. We use these profiles for making new friends, forging new relationships with old friends and organizing new groups and future events.

But it's also much more than that. The news feed combines with your wall posts to form a community generated catalog of the environmental factors that made you who you are today. It's a Wikipedia of you, written by your own social group. Once more and more people start to appreciate it as such, someone will make an app that aggregates all of your contributions and all of your friends' contributions that pertain to you and make the whole thing searchable by time. If that's not a time machine, I don't know what is.

Of course, anyone can delete anything off of their wall, so the history of you is only as detailed as you want it to be. At the same time, I'm sure that every keystroke you've ever entered into Facebook is saved on a server somewhere. If we could find those, then the knowledge of what you deleted off of your wall would be even more valuable than what you left on it. This strikes to the heart of what could make Facebook so valuable as a "life archiving" tool. We're not just looking at pictures and videos of you, we're getting a view into how you thought and felt when those pictures were taken. It's like lifelong extensive journaling for people who are too lazy to engage in lifelong extensive journaling.*** Surely those forgotten keystrokes are near-impossible to find, but maybe that's because nobody has cared enough to figure out a way to do it. They will someday; it's only a matter of time.

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*Except of course for certain people who matriculated at Ivy League Universities in the fall of 2003, but that is a very small group.
**For the purposes of this post, we will assume life begins at birth, although that does not necessarily represent the world view of this post's author.
***Which is pretty much everybody.