It started out as a fad. People said that it would never catch on. It was too hard to understand, to comprehend and to master. Embracing social media can be what you make it, but you can’t make it go away, and it has created a dependency.

How credible could it be? It was created by college kids in a dorm room. Most likely out of boredom. And many people laughed at the concept and the creation.

Nobody’s laughing now as the billion-dollar company is worldwide and growing.

Facebook with all of its quirks, technical problems, lawsuits and growing pains, is doing just that. Growing. At a rate unfathomable by the human mind.

It has introduced apps, ideas and has generated cutting edge technology that nobody had the insight to see coming. It opened up the world and made it a little smaller. And for all who talk against it, leave it, ostracize it and condemn it, there are more who talk “on” it, come back to it and it praise it. Some, they say, are addicted.

If we each had a nickel for each time someone said, “in a minute, I just have to check my Facebook,” we would be rich, my friends.

It has become an integral part of who we are, what we do, how we snoop, how we laugh and how we cry. Almost everything in media is either shared to Facebook or commented upon there and anything that appears on that site is shared by someone.

Closer to home, it is the grapevine unlike any other that keeps us all connected. It causes our visual centers to associate people with names and places and causes us to make “wish lists” in our own minds.

Just recently someone had responded to the fair photos I posted. A person who grew up in Wheatland but moved away years ago. The augmented presence to Facebook from media and the willingness to report on a global scale the events of a small town has been huge.

“I feel as if I am still living in town,” they said. “Although I am a thousand miles away, I feel connected.” I think that is the charm. As the world becomes so big in its scope and reach, people don’t want to lose that feeling of the small-town connection.

There are still a few media moguls who refuse to share any published information on places other than something they feel that they can own and control, not to mention only places that have their own name upon it. That’s like refusing to drive their own cars on highways and byways that don’t bear their own name.

It’s all part of an internet superhighway and Facebook is like Route 66 when it was in it’s heyday. We drive upon it, showing off our vehicles, sharing our families and our communities. We honk at those who proceed too fast or creep along like turtles in the Fastlane. We read bumper stickers and notice what strangers are munching on in the privacy of their own front seat. We notice the “license plates” from other parts of the world and wave as we go by.

And we pass the time sightseeing as we go from destination to destination upon our journey we call life. We notice something out of our window in the car and call to the whole family to look left, swipe right or look what just happened behind us.

We all share what we see out of our own windows. For a moment. And then it passes. The scenery changes and someone else calls our attention to another window. And we come, look over their shoulder and together we share the moments.

Not only do we share their moments, but we record their moments and create scrapbooks together. Little do we know, but we are preserving time for future generations. We create our own biography and photo album that we can take with us wherever we go. And we leave it for all to see long after we’ve gone. It’s our “legacy book” or I should say, “legacy wall.”

Whenever we’d go to visit our mom and dad, we had a tradition. One that sounded lame and hokey, but we’d get sucked into it and hated to admit that it always turned into a favorite memory.

Mom was anal about her picture albums. She had pictures from before we were born so that we could see who our ancestors were. She had pictures from the moments of our life as DeLaps. Each album was carefully labeled and put into her picture closet that resembled a library. Each album was listed by year. One album per year. And each picture had a name or a note or a date.

We’d sit down to dinner and have a question about what happened back in 1977. A friendly argument would ensue and then mom would pull out the album from that year and find the answer. That of course would lead to pulling out other years, staring in amazement with smiles on our faces at how old we’d grown, and telling the same stories over and over again. The ones that made us who we were.

My mom passed in 2015, and every now and again, I go to her Facebook page which is still up – simply because she never trusted anyone with her password any more than she trusted us to label or insert pictures into her albums. And sad to say her actual photo albums are split among three states with my siblings. Every once in a while, I get a hankering to go to Milwaukee to revisit the 80s.

She posted no picture on her Facebook profile as she was not one to like “any” of the pictures of herself, and of course, somewhere along the line we’d hear, “oh I looked so fat in that picture.” But still, she had it in there.

Admit it or not, we’ve all adopted that Midwestern tradition of “Scrappin’” which is short for recording an event or time with pictures and notes for all posterity.

Our digital footprint has become clearer and more defined over the past 20 years and it’s a good thing that we’ve developed the storage capabilities for all we record. Mom’s closet would just not have been big enough for all the pictures.