The Link Between Social Media and Our Memories

New week. New topics. New post. 

This week, we continued discussing Humphy's The Qualified Self as well as some other readings. Stemming off of a similar topic of social media diaries from a couple weeks ago...I wanna talk about what social media means for our memories.

Similar to diaries, scrapbooks, picture albums, etc. social media has become another way to share and document our lives for 2 main reasons:

remembrance and nostalgia.

However, there is one more little thing we have all come to do in between those two reasons. (But we'll get to that soon).

First, remembrance.

Humphrey talks about social media as a way that we can connect with ourselves and anticipate what we will want to look back on in the future. See, when we are in the present, taking pictures to save or post, we are assuming that we will want to look at them sometime in the future, and when that day comes, we will be looking back at our past selves (or past people we know) and appreciating the fact that at that time, we decided to record that piece of our lives. 

Whether it was a selfie, taken alone, in our room, at 2am, a video of 2 of our closest friends at dinner the week before, or a picture we took with a family member who passed away a few years prior, these are all things we wish to turn around and enjoy another day.

Take me, for example, I played softball in high school and was really close with my teammates so any practice, game, tournament, or outing, we would all record almost every second. As the years went on and I got closer to the end of my career (yes I do call the 10+ years of softball I played a career), I began recording more and taking more pictures because I knew there would come a day I would look forward to revisiting those days.

me playing catcher my Junior year

Those memories came to an abrupt stop my senior year due to Covid, but the pictures of my teammates, the compilation video of good times, the videos people snuck of my goofing off, and the videos of my plays in the field that I got the chance to post before it was over, are things that my friends and I talk about to this day when we all get back together. They let us go back and relive those moments in our lives.

While I did live in the moment with those girls, I did also want to make sure that I recorded those memories to keep forever - even the embarrassing ones.

This kind of leads me to my next point: Forgetting.

Author Kate Eichhorn wrote The End of Forgetting, a book about how times have changed and how social media has affected how our childhoods are remembered.

See, for this class, we only had to read the introduction and the conclusion but from what I gathered, she seems to believe that her upbringing was drastically different (maybe even better) because it wasn't entirely recorded for the world to see. Before social media was a big thing, mothers kept drawers and books full of childhood pictures and knick-knacks. She talks about the embarrassing moments we all had growing up and how you used to just be able to go and throw out whatever your mom kept and one day you'd all forget.

Now? Nope. Not possible.

Every achievement, embarrassing moment, sideswipe bang, Minecraft phase is on Facebook (or your parental's social media of choice). There is no going back. They will never delete it and if by chance you get their login when they die, friends and family have already gotten their copies to repost for the rest of your embarrassing life. 

Eichhorn makes this seem like the end of the world. As if the world would crumble if everyone knew that you had to have braces because you weren't born with perfect teeth or something. I don't think it's all that bad to be honest. This is where we ended up in class...

I am 20 years old. A lot of people in my class are right around that age as well (minus Vrooman of course). We were born in this awkward in-between stage where we have hard copies and Facebook posts of our childhood at different stages. If you're like me, your mom has an album of you as a child until about 3 or 4, then she switched to Facebook with a little overlap around 4 years old and posts your baby pictures next to the most recent photos of you on your birthday.

But she also has posted a loooooooooot of embarrassing stuff of me along the way. From videos of me wrestling with my brothers to singing into fans. From pictures of me at every Halloween to me having food in my mouth or within reach in every candid shot. I'm not embarrassed by it, though. I think it is funny and honestly, I prefer to show off the stupid pictures of me as a kid than the ones my grandma made me and my siblings take at Target every year (sorry grandma, if you read this, I still love you).

my all-time favorite, go-to childhood picture to show people
(yes the large soda was delicious)

I feel like in the past, you could just tear it up or "lose the book" and it was no big deal. Kids now all think they are cool and have always been cool so they don't care because there will always be somewhere online or in-person to fit in with. For my awkward "partial generation," it's hit or miss. Some of us don't care who sees us when our mom made us match pj's with our brothers and others do.

Now that middle ground I mentioned before: Reckoning.

Just to make this clear, Humphry defines reckoning for this purpose, as understanding, considering, and evaluating people based on media traces. One way Humphry explains this reckoning is by getting a different perspective on ourselves and others. The selfies we take, the selfies we see, the off guards that get posted, all offer a new look into peoples' lives.

This leads Humphry to introduce the idea of reconciliation. The reconciliation is realigning ourselves with the old and new parts of ourselves we post on social media. Looking back at who we once were and who we are now and coming to the terms with the fact that we've changed (looks, opinions, or otherwise).

I included this here because I feel like Humphry makes a good point. Whether we are making the memories we wish to make simply to look back on or we are regretting being unable to get away from the trauma of our childhood, it all comes together when we revisit these traces of our lives.

"One is never done. There is always more to document and share." (Humphry 112)

        

Social Media: Who sets the trends?

A really cool picture of social media apps 

   

I am in love with social media. The idea that I get to interact with all my friends and even meet new people on social media apps is something I became desperate for in high school I must admit. Even now through my college years, I find myself lingering for hours through posts from people I know, and even people I randomly stumble upon from a rabbit hole of clicking on peoples names and their profiles. All this to say, people have ultimately followed a "trend" in the acceptance of what is considered a worthy post. 

Who sets these trends?  Do these trends fluctuate across apps? 

My love for social media and the countless hours I waste on this app is enough to make me believe I have what it takes to break it down for you, the reader that I know has multiple social media accounts, and tell you about my perspective on what trends look like for these applications. Beyond this however, taking a class at Texas Lutheran University on Social Media & Society with Professor Steven Vrooman helps out a lot as well. 

Let's break this down a little. 

Lee Humphrey's writes a book, The Qualified Self: Social Media and The Accounting of Everyday Life. This book goes into depth about multiple ideas on the effects social media has on our lives. Humphrey's expresses some quality points within some chapters that tie in to how I question where trends come from. 

Chapter 3 of Humphrey's book, Performing Identity Work, is a great piece of context to take into consideration. This chapter focuses on identities people take on from real life and through social media, and if they line up to be unison or two completely different 'people'. Humphrey's exemplifies this through her personal life and the different roles she takes on, but which identity is prioritized? The same goes for our lives with social media. I can use myself as an example. 

This is 7th grade me. If it wasn't for the fact that I forgot my password, this instagram account would have been deleted because it is nothing but CRINGE for me. You would think it is cringe true, but do you know why? I will go on to explain this soon, because the focus of this picture is on me bio. You see that I literally lay it all out there. Name, religion, sport, grade, school, and even relationship status!! It is hard to see how I am not an open book identity from seeing this. The posts I created on this account only go to show more on how I add to being more of an open book. My life at this time was true to my identity I presented on social media. You saw me for who I really was, and let everything out there, even when I had bad days and talked about crushes, EVEN THOUGH MY PARENTS FOLLOWED THIS ACCOUNT HAHA. I take on Humphrey's identity work from chapter 3 by being true to who I am... in middle school at least. 

Anddddd this is me now. This could very much still be cringe and I haven't seen it yet, but I will say it is A LOT cleaner than middle school me. Sure, it comes with growth and growing up and finding me blah blah blah. However, I believe we all see these changes because a part of our phases come from trends we see on social media. Making a clear cut bio for instagram is from seeing all my peers, and even people older than me make their instagrams this way. I felt influenced enough to follow those trends. It makes me question, who first started the trend??? 

Visualizing this type of trend is pretty vague I know, and I realize it is going to take more content to help you see what it is I am talking about.. so bare with me. 

Humphrey's 4th chapter, Remembrance, makes the connection to how we use social media to establish posts that help keep up with our present selves that can be become past reflections as we look back to them from the future (Humphrey's, 2018). Basically, think of these posts as a big online scrapbook. What makes these posts significant enough to scrapbook for people to see? The trend in play does. 

This is a post from my 7th grade instagram, which in context of Humphrey's, is my scrapbooking as a kid. I perceived this as an event worthy enough to share to the world! 4 likes worth sounds about right for something I took about 10 minutes to make with a collage app that was the big trend in its time. Looking back to this post however, I can remember how excited I was to go to my first Texas football game ever. Making this post as a 12 year old kid made me feel so cool and a huge talking point with all the cool guys. Using the trendy collage setup made me believe in that moment (present) that it was a worthy post. Looking at it now (future) however makes me realize how idiotic it was to wear my pee-wee football jersey with khaki shorts to a football game and believe it was a way to get recruited to Texas (past) 

7th grade me (past) wasn't envisioning this kind of growth 9 years later. from 4 to roughly 400 likes seems like a big jump right??? Trends matter. From the first look you see I went away from collages and posted multiple photos with an actual photographer who has a real camera. I posted this to keep a scrapbook memory of my 22nd mark so future me can see how young and cool I was I hope. However, the main idea is I flowed with the trend, and where the heck did that trend come from?? Obviously it worked and maybe I got a little boost from the fact that it is my birthday which kind of forces people to like and comment, but the trend of scrapbooking style got me here. It may be cringe that I am looking at nothing and holding my jacket out like there is a wind when I come back to this post in the future, but it is a risk I was willing to take lol.