Facebook turned 10 last week. Instead of inviting all 1.19 billion plus users to its birthday party, the company gave us a summary of our Facebook lives from when we joined the social network to now.

The one-minute long ‘Look Back’ videos feature our most liked posts and pictures through the years. You know, the most important moments of our lives, all set to pleasant, nostalgia-inducing music.

My ‘most important moments’ were a picture of fish, a ‘like my status and I’ll post something on your wall’ status, a picture of a few former friends and my “I got into Syracuse!!!” status.

One out of four isn’t bad.

Did I do Facebook wrong? How did a funny picture of fish from Petco make it into my defining moments when my high school graduation didn’t?

The ‘Look Back’ videos are eerily symbolic of our current reality. Without meaning to, Facebook captured the essence of social media in a one-minute nutshell. Although we are in charge of our own online identities, things we post can be taken out of context and grossly misinterpreted.

What you post can define you, but it might not represent the real you, which Facebook has always intended to capture with its comprehensive profiles.

Since its creation in 2004, Facebook has become the mainstream way to document our lives. Twitter captures fleeting thoughts and Instagram filters our social lives into beautiful snapshots, but Facebook, despite its reported decline in popularity, is our go-to for big announcements and photo albums.

Stalk a Facebook long enough, and you can get a pretty accurate description of that person’s life.

The ‘Look Back’ videos disprove Facebook’s comprehensive image ideal.

The executives at Facebook are no different than the acquaintance looking through your pictures trying to figure out your relationship status, or your assigned roommate trying to figure out if you’re normal before he or she moves in with you.

The social media giant wanted to prove it has known its users personally since the beginning. Because it can’t personally lurk over a billion people, the only way to do that was with an algorithm identifying the most popular posts. And according to Facebook, the number of likes something gets is directly proportional to its importance.

Facebook’s mathematical approach to being personal imitates the assumptions we make about someone based on their Facebook page, only on a larger and more exaggerated scale.

More likes on our pictures and posts means our “friends” care about what we have to say, which equates to some type of importance. So Facebook got part of its algorithm correct.

But it ignored its longtime identity as the social network where our profiles complement our real lives. Blindly searching our past for anything with high interaction numbers inaccurately depicts who we are.

Facebook’s ‘Look Back’ video is a great lesson for social media users. Everything you’ve posted for the past 10 years can be turned into an erroneous one-minute summary of your life, so curating what you post is more important than ever.

Everything from your most recent status updates to your oldest picture defines your online persona. The longer the Internet is around, the longer your electronic paper trail is going to be.

So after 10 successful years, Facebook reminded us that anything you’ve ever said can be used to define you in the present, even if it’s outdated and inaccurate. But if we want the world to witness our biggest moments and random thoughts, that’s a sacrifice we have to make.

Kate Beckman is a freshman magazine journalism major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at kebeckma@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @Kate_Beckman.

Published on February 11, 2014 at 2:18 am