Putting your best Facebook forward

Despite my hermit-like avoidance of social networking sites, I land on a few from time to time. None hold my attention for very long, but I do thumb through the pictures despite the often

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

shallow and redundant content. Cameras can now take hundreds of pictures which should greatly magnify our ability to capture rare events and brief moments in time, yet the majority of online photo albums feature the same predictable scenes: friends posing as if staged for a portrait, holding up their drinks, flashing their "victory" fingers or wagging their tongues (how happy the day will be when this trend dies).

The background, foreground and context are ignored and candidness apparently goes without consideration, unless of course it's in catching someone in a compromising situation. This raises the real point of concern.
When teens through twenty-somethings are documenting the unruly, experimental, law-breaking, party-dedicated experiences of their youth, what kind of photographic legacy are people leaving for their children?

The photos I have of my relatives are respectable scenes, depictions of civil social gatherings. I don't have a picture of my grandfather doing a keg stand or my mother hanging on men who were not my father. I know they were all young once and went through similar experiences, maybe made similar mistakes, but the world wasn't watching then. Their was no chance their embarrassing situations would end up on YouTube.

When generations down the line are assigned a genealogy project for school, they'll compile their ancestral information with ease by simply plugging our names into Google. What sorts of images will they find?