Hannah Jones/Winonan

When I was little, my Girl Scout troop went on a camping trip.

“Camping” here is an operative term having less to do with tents and more to do with fully heated and wired buildings that happen to be located in woodland areas. We didn’t catch fish or forage for berries or learn how to tie knots or pee behind bushes.

We did, however, make a lot of lanyards, scare ourselves stupid with PG-13 ghost stories, and listen to the same Girl Scouts sound track until the troop mothers officially banned them for the remainder of the trip.

We also scrapbooked.

Until this point, I had never so much as looked at a scrapbook, much less made one. Scrapbooking, it seemed to me, was one of those traditional and antiquated feminine arts, like embroidery or riding sidesaddle. I would much sooner use the craft supplies in front of me to make a comic book about talking mice than make a decorative page for our amateur photography.

I grew impatient. I grew bored. I couldn’t see the point. Who, I demanded, even bothered with this sort of thing anymore?

In college, I’ve discovered that scrapbooking, this dusty old tradition keeping company with quilting and crocheting doilies, is still alive and well. In fact, its popularity is rampant. It just goes under a different name and wears a different face than the yellowed tomes of our mothers and grandmothers.

Scrapbooking is still a prevalent cultural art, especially in female circles, but it no longer requires construction paper or glitter or glue.

The scrapbook of today is digital.

I realized this one day when I was with some friends, and we were idly scrolling through their albums on Facebook. One by one, we paged through the pictures, reading the captions—from clever to cute—aloud, and laughing as we reminisced.

The photos sometimes chronicled entire events from start to finish: there was us in the car on the way to the concert, there was the French braid my friend put in my hair, and there, just a single snapshot of a ticket. It may as well have been glued onto a decorative page.

All of these personal social media pages, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress and Tumblr, are scrapbooks.

The fancy scalloped shears and sequins may be missing, but at their heart, these sites are places where we put little clippings of our lives, our memories, our friendships.

We embellish, make them pretty—a scenic cover photo here, a themed background there—and we put as much thought into the captions as we would if we were spelling out the words in silver sharpie. Facebook even has a button that allows the user to “see friendship” between his or herself and another user, creating a profile of photos and events and interests that the two of them share.

There it is, as if spelled out in cutout paper letters: our friendship.

I remembered then how I had felt about the art of scrapbooking, how tedious and trivial it all seemed. And yet, I often put as much work into these online exhibits as my peers do, carefully choosing which photos to upload, arranging them in a pretty way, tagging each of my friends so they can see, remember, laugh. I, in spite of my rolled eyes and my loud complaints of boredom and frustration, have become a scrapbooker, and I’m far from alone.

I realized I had missed the appeal of scrapbooking when I was younger. Scrapbooking isn’t about the scrapbook itself. Nobody sets out to create a great masterpiece when they put glitter to paper and start sifting through photos. Nor are they creating a historical document, necessarily.

Rather, the scrapbook is about the people in it. It’s about making some kind of an archive for the feelings that span between friends and family. It’s a textual body for emotion, memory and even love. And in that sense, those Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts, blogs and even those big sparkly books aren’t silly or worthless at all.

They are treasures. They are offerings. They are testaments.

Maybe someday, when I’m a troop mother in my 40s in some building out in the woods, I’ll help a gaggle of girls upload and arrange all their photos from the day on the Internet. Maybe I’ll tell the especially antsy one to stop making webcomics and try to create just one little photo album of her and her friends making lanyards.

She still won’t get into it, of course. But, give her a few years.

Contact Hannah at [email protected]