I still remember the day I got my Facebook. It was the summer after sixth grade; in my eyes of the time, absolutely old enough to create my own profile on this new(ish) site everyone was talking about. After convincing my dad--only after he'd decided to get one as well for the sole purpose of monitoring me online--I spent probably an hour customizing my very own Facebook profile.

This story I'm sure was nearly replicated by preteens around the world in the few years following the popularity of MySpace, and before today's newer social media sites. The vast majority of us got Facebooks before the end of middle school, and the peak of the site's popularity among adolescents ensued. We clicked "Become a Fan" on any and everything that even infinitesimally related to us. We liked the pages of MTV and Hollister and we got into "Facebook Fights" over the trivial drama of young teenagers. Our pictures were all over-edited selfies or taken with friends on the webcams on our computers with the weird effects. None of our parents had taken any interest yet in this website they surely dismissed at the time as something for kids.

Suddenly, a shift occurred. Instead of seeing solely the late night thoughts of my peers, I saw an album of wedding pictures posted by someone my mom's age with one of my friends tagged. Gradually, the recipe videos and memes joking about the struggles of parenting began to take over the social media platform that had previously solely been ours. We realized that parents were becoming more and more active Facebook users on the profiles they had originally created as silent bystanders, occasionally checking up on their kids' posts.

Our posts in turn changed as we understood that we could no longer post complaining about getting our phones taken away without our grandparents seeing and commenting asking why (love you guys). Facebook became a forum for the most edited and PG versions of our lives. Our more temperamental musings and any school drama quickly moved to Twitter. Before long, this is what we all used as a replacement for what Facebook once was.

Soon after Twitter became the go-to social media for our generation, Instagram became a staple as well. Tumblr and more recently, VSCO are the sites for the more private and artsy online individuals. Snapchat has quickly risen in popularity in the last two years or so as one of the most prominent forms of social media.

Why is this? Why are these types of platforms more appealing to our generation than Facebook nowadays? Why has Facebook become a network of adults instead of what it once was?

Convenience, impermanence, mystery.

Twitter limits posts to 140 characters, on Instagram you post one picture at a time, snapchats only last a maximum of 24 hours, Tumblr and VSCO are highly customizable and less exposed. In short, we like our peers to know what we are doing a lot of the time, but not everything that we do. We like to keep some mystery in our online personalities because we believe it makes us more interesting. There's nothing wrong with this, I just think it's something to note that we prefer to share clipped versions of our lives as compared to older generations of our time.

Facebook, on the other hand, is the outlet the adult world has been missing for all of time--those of our parents' generation can now share every detail of their lives with people they went to high school with, and others they've known in different stages of their lives over the years. The ease of use, practicality, and the ability to document life has been discovered by their world now as it originally was by ours. Facebook is so useful for our age group too (in a more mature sense now), with our ability to create groups for business and school and connect with adults now that we're in colleges away from them.

Older adults are using Facebook to maintain the image that they've established for themselves in their lives and to document the events that matter most to them in a more complete and permanent form. We, as young adults, keep our Facebooks for practicality, but focus our primary attention on establishing our own reputations on platforms that leave more room for error. It's interesting that we have the ability to post what we want on so many different forms of social media in order to piece together the versions of ourselves that we are becoming.

So, when we get married and have kids will we drop our current favorite social media apps and websites? Or is our generation ever-changing to the point where we won't want to commit to the transparency of a network like Facebook? In ten years, will we still seek the less exposed, more temporary version of expression provided to us by Twitter and Snapchat? And how will our kids feel about our social media? I'm fascinated to find out.