As college students, we’re constantly wired to technology. It has become an integral part of our day-to-day lives — we’re plugged in through our laptops, our smartphones and our tablets.
Our incessant need to update statuses, comment on each other’s posts and upload pictures are just a part of life, it seems. Often, the people who surround us — those of the older generations that went through life without the unnecessary social tools — see technology as evil, which is understandable.
We’re living a large part of our lives through wiring and transmitted signals.
It can seem cold and impersonal, and it often is.
The world of social networking, what with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr … engulfs our generation.
Even we recognize the downsides, a majority of the time, yet we still opt to indulge.
I, however, see an inherent, but often overlooked, beauty in it all. Think about it.
Those active on Facebook and especially Tumblr are constantly updating every bit of their profile and page to reflect their current mood and stage in life.
The opinions and photographs uploaded are snippets of the present, thrown onto the endless web that is the Internet.
When Facebook first released its new Timeline format, people were outraged. Not just because they feared change, but because of the odd abilities Timeline presented in forms of social “stalking.”
But let’s be honest … have people really used Timeline to creep through the histories of random people they are friends with on Facebook?
I have, on my own profile.
It was such an interesting, slightly scary adventure. With only a few clicks, I could access things I posted years before, even posts from five years ago when I first activated my account.
My Facebook page contained bits of my life from the past five years that I wouldn’t otherwise have remembered.
As I looked back over the countless posts, I saw messages from friends I no longer have, “likes” of my interests at that time, and photographs of memories I might not look at in other contexts — little moments from forgotten days.
Not everything on my Facebook page evoked happiness or pride — as the past often stirs hurtful memories and painful thoughts — but those hurtful and painful bits are just as necessary, if not more, than the jovial ones.
Tumblr fits that sentiment, more so than Facebook.
With Tumblr, more is possible. A lot of the people I’ve talked to who don’t have a Tumblr don’t believe me, but on Tumblr, what I see and what I know, many others get see as well — it’s sort of like a virtual scrapbook, a collection of all the thoughts and interests that comprise each person depending on what they choose to post.
With Tumblr, we have the Archive, which catalogues every single post by date. I can view the first posts I ever made, back in February 2010.
From there, I see a track of my life for the past two-and-a-half years. I see the photography I’ve posted merge with a collection of famous quotes I enjoyed and soon began to understand.
From there, I reblogged songs, videos, pictures, quotes and text posts I enjoyed or identified with, but most importantly, I actually blogged.
I wrote about my feelings of the day or of any incidences I felt were earth shattering at the time. I wrote about relationships, mistakes, precious little moments and some of the greatest days of my life.
I often mused this summer what a double-edged sword Tumblr was, holding moments of my past for me to either pine for or scoff at in the future.
Yet, to have all these bits of me frozen in the past is a blessing.
Even though Facebook and Tumblr are often pests in my daily life and constant sources of procrastination, they are both worthy endeavors — they’re this generation’s time capsules.
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