It was a part of my daily routine for nearly a full year. Each and every morning whenever I started my day, I'd log in to Facebook and browse lists of posts I'd made "on this day" years earlier. Some were good, some were bad, and some were just downright ugly.
In the grand scheme of things, it's an extraordinarily useful tool. It always made my day to come across old photos that I had forgotten even existed or memorable conversations that I once had with friends. On the other hand, however, some of us have been on Facebook much longer than others, and I don't think any of us imagined during the earliest days of the platform's existence that its memory would be quite this good.
For those first few years, Facebook was like the wild, wild West of the internet. Anything went. There was no precedent for what, when or how to post, and most of us users were only teenagers. We were just winging it. And that's where the bad part comes in.
Almost everyone who had a profile at that point has discovered a few Facebook memories that they wish they could forget. Some of them are embarrassing things, like the time I accidentally posted a text that I thought I was sending to an old girlfriend. Sometimes you come across photos that didn't look nearly as great as you thought they did, like the Randy Orton photo I set as my profile picture when I was 12.
What's worse is that sometimes you come across posts that, in hind sight, were incredibly unnecessary. Occasionally you'll find where you got into heated debates that could've easily been avoided, complained about small things that didn't matter or took stances on social issues that seem a little more harsh than you recalled.
The ugly part is realizing that all those things you wish you hadn't posted are pretty easy to locate — not just by you in your Facebook memories, but by anyone who takes an interest in your past.
Think about it. Our generation's kids won't ever have to wonder what their parents were like at any certain age. They'll always be just a few clicks away from finding that information on the internet. They can dig up our interests, our relationships, how we carried ourselves, how we treated others and an endless number of other things.
In a sense, we've all spent the past 15 or so years building detailed manuals for our children to learn anything they want to know about us.
When you consider it from that aspect, we carry more responsibility for the things we post than we'd have ever imagined when we were teens. Not only are children constantly watching and learning from the examples we set for them, but they're also way, way more savvy with technology than my generation or any other. The internet is their world. We just built it for them.
Even if it seems insignificant in the moment, someone is always watching and reading, and what they learn just might stick with them longer than we hoped when we typed it.
All things considered, we'd all be wise to take just a little more time to ponder the question, "What's on your mind" before spilling it onto a web page and clicking "post."
Brad Crowe is sports editor of The Columbian-Progress. He may be reached at (601) 736-2611 or sports@columbianprogress.com
