Earlier today, I was having a conversation with an old friend of mine about the idea that parents oversharing about their children is ‘ruining their lives’, as mentioned in this article:
http://aplus.com/a/sharenting-parents-oversharing-facebook-social-media
My initial response was to say that this was a social change that people were going to need to ‘learn to get over’, and that they should focus on doing the things they want to do, and ignoring those who want to judge them over unimportant things.
After some discussion, I realized that my opinion was coming from a place of significant privilege, not just cis/white/male/etc, but because I’d never experienced that horribly invasive mocking and worse that so often happens to people on social media.
I think this really revolves around issues of consent, and I wonder how much the posting of pictures of children without their consent is similar to giving them a hug without their consent. It could be that in a few years, this will be seen as just as important.
We have very stringent laws about privacy of medical records. Why not for photos? I’m assuming this is mostly about the ability of photographers to do their jobs and the total unenforceability of such an idea.
But if you can be denied a job because of something you did in your spare time the same way you could be denied a job because of an existing condition, why would we not extend those protections?
If I have kids, I believe I would limit how many pictures I post of them on social media. I often see new parents posting hundreds (perhaps thousands?) of pictures of their kids on Facebook as they grow up and I have to imagine that it must make for a weird upbringing for the kid that hundreds of people they’ve never met have seen them hundreds of times. It’s weird to think about it… every co-worker, past and present, every family member, every past schoolmate, casual acquaintances, whomever the parents know who happens to be on their friend list has already seen this child hundreds of times before the child is even aware of what it means and I have to imagine it being pretty surreal to have total strangers acting like they know everything about you.
I don’t know about it “ruining their lives,” but I can imagine a number of ways that could be a bad experience.
I feel like the difference there is that this used to happen to children of very social parents, now it’s starting to happen to everyone…
…And on a much larger, wider scale, like the whole world can see their pictures/videos if they want to.