Use your Social Media as a journal of your life

For much of our lives growing up, my mother had a calendar on the kitchen bulletin board. It noted doctor’s appointments, school days off and the like. She also would note when people came to visit, or we were on vacation. The calendar made a nice journal of our family.

Facebook is that kind of journal of our lives now, but it is an imperfect one.

Facebook material is fragile. Facebook will go away someday like MySpace and Google+ did, and there is no easy way export your posts so you have them locally. There are even limits on the amount of material it retains. The little town I was born in has a Facebook group where people scan in all sorts of photos and share them.

Others will comment on the photos, adding content, identifying people etc. My mother is one of the oldest people still alive who lived there and a lot of her insights on those photos will disappear with her because it turns out that Facebook only saved the first 25,000 photos uploaded, before it started erasing the old ones and their comments to make room for the new.

Here is my suggestion if Facebook is where you record your memories, your successes, or failures, your travel and your family, go to Blogger.com, a Google service, and start a blog. It is free. Once a month or so, go through your Facebook posts and copy & paste the material and photos you want to save to your blog. That lets you share it with the world, and have it somewhere else than Facebook as a backup.

And then, once every six months or so, use Google Takeout’s service to download a copy of your blog posts to a file on your own hard drive. Maybe even dump those files into Evernote, or Google Drive, or Microsoft’s OneDrive. That way if any one system fails, or goes away, you have the material somewhere.

I also dump all of my photos into Google Photos. It has many positive features worthy of a future newsletter. One pertinent to this conversation is I can go back and see all the photos chronologically.

My Evernote notes also can viewed by date created.

Google Maps has a future where I can see my travels for a day on a map.

And Google Calendar of course retains even past appointments for easy viewing.

Its isn’t hard to use these tools to recreate a day; the places you were, the photos you took, the appointments you had and the notes you made.

Even if you do not think you’ll enjoy reviewing it in the future, perhaps one of your survivors will. My brother has become the genealogist of our family, collecting as much as he can about our previous generations. If someone in your family develops that interest, your memories would be valuable to them.

Some say social media is a bane, and too often they are right in that it is too easy to craft a world where your ideas and beliefs are rarely challenged, and your misconceptions reinforced. But as a way to journal your life and that of your family, and share it, social media has its value. Maybe the simple act of curating your Facebook posts to see the ones you want to save, will act to focus your original posts on the critical things.