“How Young Is Too Young for a Digital Presence?” is the title of a New York Times article, May 14, 2014, by Molly Wood. She writes that “some parents savvy in matters of social media are establishing web and email accounts, not to mention usernames, for their newborns.” This is not new news but seems to be sparking new debate.
I love the anecdote she selected:
Take Kate Torgersen of Berkeley, Calif. She has a 3-year-old son, Jackson, and 8-month-old twin girls. She registered an email account for her son when he was born so she could email milestones and anecdotes to him as a kind of digital baby book.
“We weren’t ever going to do a Facebook page for Jax,” she said. “It just seemed kind of inappropriate. We wanted a way to have something intimate that was also really convenient. Sending an email during your busy workday was much easier than going to a scrapbook store and trying to create a big baby book project.”
I bet the saved mail section of this new baby’s email account is off the charts already. I hope the mother made folders. This Grandma just learned how to make such folders.
Ms. Wood continues: “Some parents go even further – registering their babies for things like web URLs, About.me pages, Instagram feeds, Twitter handles, Tumblr accounts and email accounts on Yahoo and Gmail, all within hours of their birth. . . .In Facebook albums, online photo sites, on Instagram, on Twitter, even on their own self-branded blogs and Twitter accounts — the modern child of web-minded parents has a rich digital history all her own well before she starts to manage it herself.”
This Grandma is surprised that there is even a question or debate about this. I remember almost eleven years ago, not so crazy media time, when my first grandson’s name belonged to someone else as a website and email address at his birth and his name is not the most common in the world. Our grandchildren should have such reserved, or they may not have them in their name at all. Keeping up with the new forms of internet accounts will surely keep the parents of our grandchildren busy for years to come. What happens when everything is in a chip behind our ears, as my brother predicts, at what age shall we implant the chip? At birth?
I think the “ethical dilemma” of giving a baby an on line presence is somewhat contrived, but being careful with postings is not. Ms. Wood quotes:
“They don’t even have a say in it, and I think that’s an interesting ethical question,” said Kaveri Subrahmanyam, associate director of the Children’s Digital Media Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. There is very little research into how children will react to discovering a rich digital history about themselves once they’re old enough to get online, she said, but parents should be aware of what and how much they post.
“Parents have to be really self-aware and mindful of what they’re doing with technology, and I don’t think we’re at that point yet,” Dr. Subrahmanyam said.
The argument about privacy and protecting the privacy of the child is an important one. New parents tend to what I call “over share,” but the 24/7 realities of parenting mean less time for doing this. I remember that the first child has pictures taken daily and videos posted on You Tube but the second is lucky to have pictures to fill one “album” in the first three years of life. That has not changed from when I was a parent.
Tell the new parents to get on line presence for the new grandchild if they have not already done so, at least a website and email address in the grandchild’s name, if available. This Grandma thinks this issue will not be such a hot topic for debate in the future. “On line presence” is a fact of life in our modern world. New parents tend to worry too much and not just relax and experience the
Joy,
Mema
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