Social media and memory: how can Facebook enhance memory activity?

Abstract

The essay explores the growing influence of Facebook, a location-based social application, on personal memory archiving. Facebook can contribute to memory storage, offering new ways for users to record their current feelings, ideas and experiences, especially as related to places. In this sense, the location services facilitate the documentation of memory, and Facebook makes it possible for people to locate a place and remember what happened at that place. Facebook also encourages users to create new memories, including place-based memory and social relational memories, and various location functions such as the Nearby tab provide a wide variety of choices of places users may be interested in. Due to the increased popularity of sharing and commenting on updates on Facebook, social interactions have also been enhanced, which enables people to make more social memories.