With all the advancement of technology and the active use of Facebook, people who are having kids today are beginning their child's dossier before they are born by uploading the sonogram picture to Facebook. This is how the child's digital identity begins. This makes it difficult for their child, later in life, to control the information that was put into their digital dossier, prior to them being born and their knowledge of the online world.
Once it begins with the sonogram picture, there are statuses about the unborn child and before they know it the child is born. Afterwards, depending on how active the parents are on Facebook, there is at least one picture a day and before they know it there are 80 plus pictures on just the mother's page alone with the child being a little over one month old. The main reason the parents put up all the pictures is because they want to share their new joy with everyone around them, who are asked for them to put pictures up.
Doesn't that make the viewers of the pictures partially to blame for the massive amount of information that has been added to the child's dossier, in such a short time? Besides the fact that the parents aren't the only ones adding to the dossier, all of the family and friends that encounter the child post numerous pictures as well. Within the first month of the child's life their dossier has exploded with all this information.
I have seen this numerous times with people on Facebook but that hasn't stopped me from viewing their pictures and possibly asking for other photos. But after reading the chapter on Dossiers in Born Digital, would it stop any of us from doing the same thing later on in life when we have kids?
I personally really dislike that people will upload sonogram pictures to Facebook. That's a very private thing for, traditionally, only a family to view. I think that parents who upload so many pictures of their young (and sometimes unborn) children are doing a disservice to their kids.
ReplyDelete