The Digitization of Your Life

Our past two classes were interesting because we had the opportunity to view a great movie entitled, "The Social Network." You definitely need to see this movie if you haven't seen it already for numerous reasons. The main reason being that it explores one of the biggest phenomenons within this past decade. It also, although slightly fictional, helps the average social media user become aware of the complexities and drama that helped to build one of the most successful sites of all time. While watching the movie, Sean Parker, played by Justin Timberlake, said a couple of sentences that really got me thinking. While hosting a party after reaching 1,000,000 users, he describes the site as "the true digitization of your life." Has anyone ever thought about that? Your life is online. You know how they say that everything that you post on the internet stays there forever even when you delete it? This means that even when we leave the earth, our legacy will still be online for others to experience via different social media sites. This blows my mind. He went on to say something like if someone missed a party, they will be able to relive the party online. This is so true because we can read status updates, tweets, blog posts, and look at photos to find out what we missed. Social media have changed our lives and I don't think there is any turning back.

Unfortunately I received some extremely sad news while sitting in class the other day. The text said that one of my classmates from high school was shot and died. I asked them how they found out and they said they found out through Twitter and found out more info through Facebook. I'm not sure when I would have found out this information if this was to happen a couple of years ago. We've talked about how fast information spreads with new media, but I want you guys to think about how we are leaving a permanent online footprint, and creating a story as a result. Some of you may be confused by the last part of that sentence, but I am about to elaborate further.

Most of you probably have not heard about one of the coolest sites I have ever seen. Let's take a trip to MEMOLANE! Memolane is a site that turns your social media life into a digital story. It connects the dots, and helps to bridge a gap that many of us didn't know was missing. I encourage you all to take a look at the site. I received an invite code and began to explore the true genius that is Memolane. Basically, you can import all content from your Facebook, Twitter, RSS Feeds, YouTube Flickr, etc., and Memolane will place all of the info on a timeline. My timeline goes all the way back to 2005! It is truly revolutionary. Below you can see a portion of my timeline that shows what I was doing during a weekend in October. As the picture above says, Memolane makes history your history.  With Memolane you can see your life and collaborate with friends to help create stories and memories. This makes social media even more useful. Everybody please check it out, and check out the videos about it below which basically sums it up in a nutshell. The digitization of our life is inevitable. Are you going to accept it?