Can you remember the last time someone took a picture and the next comment from them or someone else didn’t involve concern over when it would be tagged and posted to Facebook? Social media has changed the way humans record history.
I was watching a movie where a guy joking about Facebook says, “I don’t understand the fascination your generation has with documenting your lives”.
So true. But is it a bad thing? Imagine being able to look back on your life in rich, living, media. From the day you start creating content online to the day you stop, you are capturing something more in-depth than pictures or video, you are saving interactions, conversations, thoughts, ideas, social events, even relationships, especially relationships.
We could be left with an amazing interconnected web of personal histories that might be strung together to show us a picture of a generation. You can look at social media and through all of the personal elements, see themes in the world, get a pulse on society.
We live in an age where we are all historical scribes, published writers, autobiographers, you might even say artists in some way. Facebook (and all social networks) is our stone tablet, the recordings we leave behind are going to be like nothing ever seen before.
It’s not just monuments, giant structures, and statues anymore, we are leaving behind our essence, the day to day interactions we have as individuals. The greatest tales in history are stories about individuals, not writings of royal scribes or professional historians. Imagine if everyone in the ancient world kept a diary, was an autobiographer. That’s our reality, a crowd sourced, socially powered history we are building layers of depth into every single day.
We don’t know it yet but we’re crafting something bigger than the pyramids, more expansive than the Great Wall, more detailed than the Sistine Chapel. You are the next great wonder of the world.