Facebook: Then & Now
When it comes to social media, I’d like to think I’m ahead of the game. But back in the days of high school, I could have cared less about it. Facebook became popular during my senior year of high school, but I didn’t cave into creating an account until I was forced to- when it was time to find out who our college roommates would be.
The timing that I entered the Facebook world was perfect. I joined the official page for my college’s graduating class and got to see who would be living with me, who was from my area, etc. Every day, I had so many new friend requests with the “Marist ‘11” identification beneath their name. My wall was filled with enthusiastic messages from my soon-to-be classmates, like “Leo Hall is going to be the best dorm”, and “Can’t wait to meet you- it looks like we’re living 2 doors down from one another!”
My timing was perfect also because Facebook was one of the main ways I could communicate with my friends from home. Everyone from home would write posts weekly on my wall saying how much they missed me, random old classmates would ask how college was going and I would get so many photo comments and likes- I felt like a celebrity!
Facebook got even better once I settled into college. My new friends would write all our inside jokes from the weekends and send me bumper stickers relating to our lives (remember how popular that app used to be?)
Over the years, my opinion on Facebook changed. It started to become a way for everyone to brag about how awesome their life is or just stalk each other. As I became busier with the work of college and grew apart from some old friends, the number of notifications of loving wall posts and photo comments became less and less. As stupid as it sounds- it hurt a little. I wondered why no one liked me enough to check in on me or tell me I looked pretty anymore.
I realized that this shift happened with time. It seems the excitement of going to college faded as I got further into my time there, people cared less about others and more about their new lives and it became uncool to write on someone’s wall 4 times a week. The popular social network changed with my generation.
I didn’t realize how huge this shift in Facebook was until I looked back on my “timeline” to my freshman year of college. It made me a mixture of sad and happy, but most of all, it made me nostalgic for a simpler time, when all I had to worry about was what to wear Friday night and which intro class I should choose. Sigh.
This post was originally featured in LA Family Magazine and can be read here. You can read all of the articles in my “Life after College” column here.
oh man when timeline came out i cried a little bit inside (you know, looking back at those old posts) facebook came out my junior year of college (gulp) and it has and i believe will continue to change the way we interact… i have to admit, i love facebook. a lot!
I dislike timeline a lot (the aesthetic layout of it makes me cringe), BUT I did love looking back on old posts. Made me sad and happy at the same time.
I find this kind of funny because this is me, ten years ago with other things on the Internet. I’ve been using the WWW pretty much since it was new. To this day, it still makes me sad how many of the awesome sites I used to visit in 99 have been gone for years.. for that matter, my boyfriend still complains things were better back in the day of bulletin boards before WWW. My point, it comes and goes with technology. For me, I still miss a ton of the static Web pages because all though they may not have had flashy graphics or dynamic interaction, often times they were a lot more creative with their sites because they HAD to be. I definitely agree though, Facebook definitely seems to be dropping off… so, just like Facebook replaced Myspace, I suppose we just have to wait for the next big thing.