Facebook never forgets. When I switched from my old Facebook profile to the timeline layout about a month ago, I regretted ever getting a Facebook at all.
Everything I had ever done on Facebook was there. Every party I had RSVPed to, whether I actually attended or not, was recorded as a “life event.” Every comment I left on someone else’s photo, status or wall was also there alongside of photo albums I had untagged myself from years ago.
As I attempted to do digital damage control on what Facebook told me my “life” was, I learned an excruciatingly painful lesson: There’s no going back on something that I wrote or posted about years ago.
According to Facebook, “Timeline is the new Facebook profile. Tell your life story through photos, friendships and personal milestones like graduating or traveling to new places.”
For many early Facebook users, like college students, instead of telling an accurate life story, it instead tells an intoxicated tale through drunken pictures and status updates.
I first started using Facebook in 2007. Like all the other users at that time, I had to sign up with a university email address.
For my first Facebook year, all my “friends” were all
classmates from either high school or college. I used Facebook the way it was originally intended to be used: to communicate with other students.
It was back in the day when it was socially acceptable to update your Facebook status multiple times a day, and when it was still funny to post unflattering pictures of your friends.
As Facebook’s audience changed and expanded, so did the way I used it to communicate. As more and more non-college students joined Facebook’s social network, I became much more conscious of the people who had access to my page. I used privacy settings, and naively believed that they would stop people from accessing my page.
When I began to get Facebook friend requests from my grandmother and other family members who I didn’t talk to on a regular basis, I began
deleting photos and I was more
careful about what I posted about.
Facebook Timeline is a constant reminder of the way I behaved in my late teens, and it is a lot behavior I am not proud of. At that age, it would have never occurred to me that every interaction I did on Facebook would be remembered forever on their servers or that I would later regret my behavior.
Now all the stupid things I did back in 2007 then bragged about to my college friends on Facebook are available for all 500 of my friends to read. While it’s fascinating and slightly disturbing to read what kind of person I was when I was 17 years old, I don’t necessarily want other people to have access to it.
The Internet never forgets. Everything we write leaves a digital tattoo somewhere and learning that was excruciatingly painful as I scrolled through thousands of status updates and tried to delete the ones full of teenage angst.
After spending hours trying to clean up my Facebook and only getting through 2007 and 2008, regret was the only thing I felt. Deleting friends and old statuses is time consuming and irritating, but in the end, the only person I can blame is myself.