What I Learned by Printing Thousands of Pages of My Facebook Data

In my attic lies a big box of scrapbooks and diaries chronicling my preteen through early college years, from the mid-1990s to early 2000s, in minute and sometimes cringe-inducing detail. The books are fat, their pages stuffed with doodles, notes passed in class, pictures clipped from magazines, and ticket stubs from multiple viewings of Titanic. But the box also speaks volumes with what’s not in it: namely, any books dated after 2004. That was the year Facebook launched, and my journaling habits tanked.

I joined as a sophomore in college, only a few months after Mark Zuckerberg hatched thefacebook.com in his Harvard dorm room. Back then, the site was accessible only to college students and felt tailored to that particular stage of our lives. It was a flirty, irreverent, and sparse online space where users could create personalized profiles, search for and “poke” each other, and not much else. As we grew into adulthood, so did Facebook. It opened its doors to anyone over the age of 13, rolled out a bevy of stimulating features like the News Feed, “reactions,” and livestreamed video, and embedded itself, uninvited, into the tasks and rhythms of our lives.

Källa: What I Learned by Printing Thousands of Pages of My Facebook Data