Monday, February 23, 2015

#tbt photos--and feelings

For the past, oh, two weeks, I've been putting up a photo on Thursday, tagged with #tbt. Which, for my parents and future anthropologists, stands for "throw back Thursday," when people post some old thing, usually (only?) a photo. (Coincidentally, I've been putting up photos for precisely as long as I've had my photo albums here with me in Austin.)

And... I don't know if I'll continue. I can't speak for everyone who does this. There's something joyous and reflective about posting old photos of ourselves and of our lives. But there's something not entirely satisfying about the nostalgia trip that these photos set up. I mean, what's the upshot of posting these photos to social sites, like Facebook? (And there's no non-social site #tbt. No one is holding #tbt parties in real life or even just breaking that old album out.)

This isn't me asking a question I have an answer to. I'm genuinely curious: what's the upshot of this sort of nostalgia? What's the benefit of sharing these old photos?

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