I was texting a friend of about life, love, suffering, blah blah. I just recently reactivated my Facebook and noticed this funny throwback feature in the midst of texting her. I used to love timehop back in the day for the exact reason that it was always a curious exercise to look back. All that said, I don’t think it’s an exercise that should be done too often. Now that it’s incorporated into Facebook, I’m curious how it’s affecting folks. For me, it made me look back and miss things irrationally. In today’s throw back, I couldn’t believe how similar the posts were to how I was feeling today. It was weird to look at my previously selected quotes and words over the years only to realize they speak to me today. I’m not sure what that says about me 🙂
I find these kinds of “features” to be fascinating. What made this popular/desired enough to add? Was there a desire to add this or was it just added as something that they thought would be a success? Does this improve people’s sense of self or is it confusing/disorienting? I looked back on posts of me post ACL tear grimacing at how terrible that process was and so thankful I’ve recovered. Looking back through previous posts has the same feeling as going through old journals. It’s a bit different though as journals are private whereas these posts are public. What image was I trying to build by posting these posts? Why did I think it was so important to share xyz in 2011 to a large number of people in my life? What was I going through? Who did I hope would see this? Who were my close friends at the time? Which post got the most likes? It’s fascinating to think about as posting on Facebook is essentially sending out a message to a massive amount of people. In any case, looking over these posts makes me realize that I have wrestled for many years over the same topics and I’m not quite sure I’m any closer to “figuring it out”. Thankfully, I don’t think the end goal is to actually figure anything out but just to remain open to the experiences.
agm 