Is Social Media New?

I have been working on an article for the Minnesota Genealogist about my second great grandmother, Minnie House. An excellent source for piecing together her complicated story has been newspapers.com.

As I searched for her name in the years and locations she once lived, I had to laugh at the results of lines from newspaper articles that were basically status updates.

“Mrs. Minnie House of Rice Lake spent Monday evening in the city visiting Mrs. Fred Blume.” The Dunn County News 20 Aug 1914

People have always been interested in who’s who, what they are doing, and where they are going. And I am thankful for every time my ancestor’s “status” was preserved. I always say family history is so much more than names and dates. It’s about real people that lived real lives, and these articles help us piece together the story of those lives.

It also made me wonder…what will future generations know about or think about me if they were reading my status updates?
What story does our social media tell?
Is it the story we want to tell?
and the message we want to leave?