We are fascinated with history.
Maybe History wasn’t your favorite subject in school, but I suspect that certain aspects of history get your attention now. There’s the History Channel on cable television with popular shows like Pawn Stars, American Pickers, and American Restoration. In fact Pawn Stars scores at the top of some cable TV ratings for certain age groups. There are books, documentaries, investigative reporting, etc. that all touch-on our fascination with history.
Historical information appeals to us because it’s about about how people and objects interacted to create a moment in time. They create a story and a connection for us to relate. We say life is all about relationships today and it was all about relationships back then also. Relationships are part of the fabric that makes us. So why wouldn’t we have a fascination with history.
We are fascinated with our own history.
There comes a time in the life of most people where they want to know more about their family lineage. For me, it hit during my college years. I spent some time at the local archives digging through census records and got back as far as my great great grandfather. Then just when I thought was picking up steam my grandmother told me she believed he was adopted. So it became complicated to proceed and I had school work to do and dropped my research.
Today, sites like Ancestry.com pull together information and provide tools to aid in historical research. I love the phrase I see when I pull-up the Ancestry.com site: “Ready to discover your family story?” That’s the connection with people. It’s not just a history of people and names. It’s a story about who your family was during a moment or a passage in time. It’s a story about what made you.
Social media is creating a historical record of our lives.
Now think about what digital media sites are creating. We are creating historical time lines of events in our lives. No longer will people piece together bits and pieces of their history by a photo album with names and dates on the back of the photographs. We are creating a digital footprint of our lives by our status updates.
Facebook has captured this the best with their new timeline feature. Facebook says “Tell your life story with a new kind of profile.” In essence they’ll sort your posts, status updates, blogs, photographs, etc. by date so that you can create the sequential story of your life. Just imagine if you had that for your great-great grandparents. You’d be interested to read that right?
Other social sites such as Google+, Twitter, and Pinterest are building and keeping this type of information as well. Blogging is great for this too and whether you are recording events in your life or expressing opinions on a subject, you are creating a sequential series of content.
The social sites are like our digital diaries.
The good and the bad of it.
I know when the Facebook timeline feature was first announced there was a flurry of activity and blog post recommendations to look at your timeline and remove posts that you didn’t want to be public. So for example, all the things you said about your-then “significant other” you might remove. Or maybe it was the things you wrote as an impulsive youth and you’ve grown wiser with your words now and want to remove them from the record. Whatever the reason, the idea is to make sure your history is clean. Then there are the privacy concerns. Do we want to have all this information exposed to stalkers and criminals?
But I think the idea is more good than bad. What’s really happening is that we are creating a life journal just by populating our social spaces with content. At some point in the future we can go-back and see our thoughts, our pictures, our conversations, etc. It’s our history. It’s what we have made.
Go make history.
So value your history, your story, your life. Keep a copy of it for yourself and future family members. (Google+ and Facebook have options to download a copy of all your content.) It’s your history. Go make it.