Facebook is my Diary
I’ve recently become fascinated with writing a diary. The idea that you can quickly view various points of your life and see what you were thinking day-by-day has always seemed incredibly cool.
In my opinion, a large part of having a diary is privacy, which allows you to fearlessly write down anything you want, no matter how unsavory or controversial, without having to worry about the opinions of others.
I decided to use Facebook as a diary by writing posts to myself every day with “only me” as the privacy setting. I set a timer for three minutes and just start writing.
Compared to a physical notebook, creating diary entries on Facebook is far more convenient. It’s platform-independent, and available to you anywhere you go.
Additionally, it allows you to add comments if you later wish to provide more information or want to “respond” to your former self.
By adding ‘diary’ at the beginning of each post, Facebook will bestow upon you insanely powerful search.
Want to track when you’ve been sad? my posts diary sad.
Want to search a time period? my posts diary between june 2013 and july 2013.
Remember vaguely that you went biking sometime last year in Italy and feeling nostalgic? my posts biking in italy last year.
Facebook automatically saves the location and dates of where you made each post. If you try to stay consistent in wording(sad vs depressed vs unhappy) you can also get vague estimates of mental health or other things over time. I’ve found it useful for tracking exercise.
There are a few downsides of this method worth mentioning. You might accidentally set the post as public. Facebook helps you out by remembering your last post’s privacy setting though, so in practice this is not a huge problem.
Your Facebook also becomes far more private. If you hand someone your phone to look at a Facebook photo, you’re suddenly giving them access to a lot of private information they might accidentally see.
Lastly, if you type someone’s name Facebook tries to tag them, and if you create a post with someone tagged they will also be able to see it.
If you try it and it ends up working for you please let me know!
