Smile! This Will Last Forever

Look at me, me me!

By Pauline Stern

If a picture is worth a thousand words then each member of the Facebook generation is working on a multi-volume autobiography.

Two technological developments - the endless memory space offered to Facebook users, and the fall in the price of digital cameras - are being paired together to produce the photo diary phenomenon.

There are a whole range of photos documenting the lives of each member. But the typical Facebook photo diary is made up mostly of party shots -- photos of the member snapping away with their digital cameras as if they and their friends were at the center of a flurry of paparazzi photographers.

One night of dancing may yield as many as 30 photos. When their ears stop ringing and their voices have recovered from shouting to the music they will have a wealth of photos to immortalize the moment when they were on top of the world.

“Currently there are 370-something tagged photos of me on Facebook,” said Melissa Davis, 20. “Of course there are more photos than that of me on Facebook, but I’ve untagged all the ones that I don’t want people seeing.”

Photos of Facebook members can be posted by either the member or by another user. Luckily, members have the option of “untagging” photos of themselves.

This doesn’t delete the photo. It simply removes their name identifying them in the picture and also removes it from the pages of photos that appear under the “View Photos of Member” button, which is located on the member’s profile page under their profile picture.

Since Facebook is a free service and the memory space allotted to each member is limitless, there is no need for a member to be stingy with posting photos of themselves.

This leads to repetitive photographs, multiple angle shots that read like a series of silent-movie still-frames. The memory of the moment captured flash by flash by flash…

“There is this one funny series of photos of me trying to get my friend and my heads both in the picture,” Said Stephanie Gonzalez, 19. “They show my total lack of hand-eye coordination”

When asked why she posted all the shots instead of selecting the least off-centered of the five she simply replied, “They’re cute, I guess I didn’t really think I needed to edit it down….Here she paused: “You don’t really get the same impression if there is only one photo of the party as opposed to 20.”

Unlike the old days of film, the cost of adding an additional photo or hundred photos on Facebook is zero. The message from Facebook to its users is, ‘go ahead post photos to your heart’s content’; the more the better as far as the company is concerned.

Although these young college-age members seem wasteful with the size of their photo diaries, viewers should not be deceived. The photos that appear are the result of careful self-editing.

The chapters of their photo diaries read like any young-adult’s cover-bound diary used to, with each member playing the role of the main-character in their photo diary world.

“I can’t wait until I’m old and wrinkly and look back at all the photos I took with my friends when I could still pull-off wearing miniskirts and tube-tops,” said. Gabriella Diaz, 19. “Sure my mom has her prom photos and high school year book to remind her of what she was like when she was young. And to prove to me that she wasn’t always a square mom, but I’ll have so many more pictures, hundreds.

"My daughter is going to know her mom was hot stuff.” laughs Gabriella, “or who knows maybe instead I’ll look at them and cringe at my love of leggings and sparkly ballerina flats.”

When Gabriella sits down with her future daughter she might discover things about her 19 year-old-self she never realized when she was 19. Diary entries are funny like that. Created in the passion of the moment -- only to be looked at differently through the lens of time.

That’s why diaries are so great and the photo diaries being created today even more so. They visually show, the joy and angst of youth entering into adulthood. The baby boomers may think they are a well-documented generation but they have nothing on the Facebook generation.

Those photo diaries being created today will forever serve as a reminder to this new generation that once upon a time they were young and hip -- and partied like rock stars.