Stephen blogged recently about how, when he's away from home, he loves keeping up with friends and family on Facebook. Loves the photos, the sharing, the little messages - likes wishing his mother a happy birthday ... and seeing the message spread around his network, so the best wishes get multiplied many times. But sharing isn't the same thing as remembering, and Facebook is really about the former, not the latter, and it's interesting to ask why. For a start, what's the likelihood of Facebook being around when our children and grandchildren want to know about us? If history is any guide, not much. (I've been using computers since pre-Microsoft and I have several generations of computer-stored memories, images, business records, documents I can no longer access). Second, Facebook doesn't edit or rank our memories, or express the significance of what we're looking at. If your grandkids could one day check out your lifetime of Facebook interactions, would they? It would be a huge, thankless task, and that trivial post about your bad hair day would get equal time with the heartfelt story you wrote about your best friend's funeral, or whatever. Same of course for the images. My parents' photo albums, the handwritten captions, the carefully typed stories, edit their experience into something I can handle, something I know I should treasure forever. They've edited their life story for significance, and left out the trivial. To an extent they've also sanitized it of course. Sharing is not the same thing as remembering, and we can't remember everything. Or pass on everything. Cheers, Ian Notice I didn't mention professional photography, but it does provide a clue as to what a professional has to do if she wants to stay in business: not just shoot photos but tell stories - generally not everyday stories either, but stories in fancy dress, fairy stories (told true), a record of how people want to be remembered. Sorry for stealing your idea Stephen ;) That photo of my grandparents' farm house does the whole Proustian memory thing on me. Long gone now … the people and the house. The smells (kitchen, tool shed, wool bales, hay) and the photos remain.