Every Saturday morning my mum uploads a photo of Cottesloe Beach to her Facebook page.

It’s her weekly ritual. On Saturday mornings, we’ll pick up my 94-year-old grandmother and grab takeaway coffees at a nearby café. Then we’ll park up at the ocean to watch passers-by as we catch up on the week that was. Before we leave, she’ll hop out of the car with her iPhone and take some photos. She’ll try and capture something new each week – a change in the season, an interesting boat that wasn’t there the week before, the pylon that often gets repainted by the rival local surf clubs in their club colours. She’ll often capture a photo of my granny, grinning as she holds her decaf flat white in her hand. Sometimes, to my dismay, she’ll turn the camera to me.

For my mum, it is a way to document a new week in her life. It is also a way for her to share it with her friends and family, to ‘check in’ and let the world know that we have completed our weekly ritual.

When she’s late to upload her post, she’ll sometimes get concerned messages from friends asking where her weekly beach photos are. More recently, she’s delved into the world of posting Instagram reels, and she gets a small thrill for the occasional video of the beach that gets a few thousand views at the whim of the algorithm. Suddenly, this simple act of documenting a weekly occurrence in our lives has become subject to an audience.  

In the social media age, many of us find ourselves turning to the internet to document our lives. From mundane food photos to the inner thought that finds itself in a post on Threads, social pages have become an integral avenue through which we document ourselves and the world around us.

So what will the shift to documenting our lives in digital spaces mean for how we archive our personal histories?

Preserving memories in digital spaces

Publicly displaying personal documents is not a new concept. When you walk into someone’s home you might expect to see photos around the house. Photos of their family, friends, special occasions. Choosing which photos to hang up, and what photos to keep stored away is a choice that communicates something about that person.

Looking at online spaces, internet and communications lecturer Dr Eleanor Sandry said that when it is moved from private to public, the act of documenting becomes more about ‘performing the self’. It becomes a more obvious process, and online platforms make it easier to adopt a multitude of different selves online.

“It’s going to be very different depending on who you are. As soon as you move into an online platform, you’re driven by the affordances of that platform, what it allows, but also what people expect of that.”

The idea of the performance of self is what American sociologist Erving Goffman theorised in his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. He imagined the social world as a stage, in which we play out different versions of ourselves to suit different environments. He differentiated between frontstage and backstage performances, in which the frontstage is the most presentable and polished version of a persona, and the backstage is the more relaxed, authentic version that is often hidden.

Anthropologist Crystal Abidin used Goffman’s theory to explore the evolution of influencer culture. In its humbler beginnings, lifestyle bloggers emulated journal-style logs of their day-to-day. Moving from this, the 2010s saw the rise of influencer culture pushing ideals that were unattainable and unrelatable. Then emerged a new trend of influencers seeking to emphasise their relatability by strategically revealing parts of their offline personas. In a rejection of the flawless influencer image, including ‘real life’ and ‘behind the scenes’ elements became the new trend. In other words, influencers have used their backstage performances of self to legitimise their frontstage personas.

“And when they approach the next threshold of authenticity, influencers design new yardsticks of self-disclosure to persuade followers that they are just like them,” Abidin wrote.

How you document your life online is largely influenced by the trends on a social media platform. Sandry pointed to Facebook as an example. For a period of time the platform actively encouraged you to put a lot of information about yourself on your profile to ‘complete it’.

Twelve years ago, American sociologist Nathan Jurgenson coined the term ‘the Facebook eye’. He said the way we perceive the world has become increasingly dictated by the social media posts that capture it. Building on the idea that the invention of the camera has led people to look at the world through the ‘camera eye’, the way we document our lives today has become subject to the reception it will receive on our online platforms.

Jurgenson would go on to work as an advisor for Snapchat, steering the app to capture authenticity by creating a platform that catered for ephemerality. He saw the idea of ‘digital dualism’ – the notion that the virtual world and the digital world are separate – as outdated. In his eyes, ephemeral content bridged the gap between the two worlds. It rejected the idea of the Facebook eye, encouraging content that was more “in the moment”.

In 2020 the BeReal messaging app was launched, this was a movement towards a less curated experience offered by platforms such as Instagram, before it fell out of vogue in 2023.

The need for authenticity constantly contends with being embraced and challenged, according to Sandry.

Diary writing isn’t dead

Traditional forms of documentation aren’t an entirely lost art form. Look to Reddit and you’ll find online communities with more than a million members who share a love of physical journal writing. One user wrote how they love that diaries give them the ability to look back and see how they used to be.

UWA student Luka Haines has found herself sticking to creating scrapbooks to house her memories. Sitting with a cup of tea in hand, Haines described the process as ‘photo-book making’ for fear the term ‘scrapbooking’ makes her seem like a grandmother. Nevertheless, Haines describes herself as old-fashioned.

“I think I’ve always found social media a bit performative,” she said.

“Even if you have a private account, it feels like you can’t really control who sees your photos.”

Haines lives in a Nedlands share house with her younger sister, two friends, and dog Bubbles. Under an array of human biology study notes stuck to her wall sits a pinboard. Rolls of decorative tape, postcards, and Polaroids tacked to it, overlooking her desk as she arranges her most recent album. I pointed to a postcard of Jane Birkin holding a camera up to her eye. She told me she had bought it on a trip to Paris.

After a trip abroad, Haines will spend time sifting through her photos before printing her favourites. She’ll sit and arrange them in a brown paper photo book, sometimes annotating them where there’s space. As she flicked through the pages she pointed to different photos – her family in Germany at Christmas, her standing in a red photo booth in London. It’s not a short process, and she’ll often come back to the book weeks later to add to it more. She was still annotating the pages of the book as she showed me.

Haines likes the tangibility of the photo album, the way she can hold it in her hands and choose who she shares it with. It’s a love that grew from looking through her mother’s old photo books when she was younger, giving her a glimpse of her mother’s life before her.

“If I show someone the photo album, I can explain that photo and I can tell you a story behind it. On social media, I can’t really do that in the same way,” she said.

Self-documentation is a personal choice that looks different for everyone. On one hand, traditional forms of record keeping such as journaling have been shown to have several cognitive benefits, including improving mental health and strengthening memory.

On the other hand, a study by Newcastle University argues that there is a lot more digital documentation can offer.  Offline documentation is usually disconnected into separate items – a journal, a photo album, or an audio or video tape recording. However, digital media offers the ability to incorporate a personal record that is multimodal and includes more sensory elements such as sound. The study suggests this has the potential to invite a more enriched experience in reminiscing on the past.

When the time comes for me to reminisce on my Saturday mornings with my mum and my grandmother, I think about what those Facebook posts are going to mean to me one day. I might resent the handful of unflattering photos of myself that become subject to the scrutiny of my mum’s friends, and strangers, on the internet. I might cringe at the multitude of hashtags she’s pasted underneath the post. I might appreciate seeing my granny’s smile when the day comes, not far from now, that she is no longer with us. Or cherish the archive my mum has created of our ordinary weekly routine, that I might find myself missing in the future.