{"id":15236,"date":"2019-02-04T02:25:02","date_gmt":"2019-02-04T02:25:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=15236"},"modified":"2019-02-06T15:30:28","modified_gmt":"2019-02-06T15:30:28","slug":"the-real-problem-with-posting-about-your-kids-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/the-real-problem-with-posting-about-your-kids-online\/","title":{"rendered":"The real problem with posting about your kids online"},"content":{"rendered":"

Priya C. Kumar<\/a>, University of Maryland<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

In a recent essay<\/a> published in The Washington Post, a mother explained her decision to continue writing essays and blog posts about her daughter even after the girl had protested. The woman said that while she felt bad, she was \u201cnot done exploring my motherhood in my writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

One commentor criticized<\/a> parents like the essay\u2019s author for having \u201cturned their family\u2019s daily dramas into content.\u201d Another said<\/a> the woman\u2019s essay surfaces a \u201cnagging \u2013 and loaded \u2013 question among parents in the age of Instagram. \u2026 Are our present social media posts going to mortify our kids in the future?\u201d<\/p>\n

These questions are valid, and I\u2019ve published research<\/a> about the need for parents to steward their children\u2019s privacy online. I agree with critics who accuse the woman of being tone-deaf to her child\u2019s concerns.<\/p>\n

However, I believe the broader criticism of parents and their social media behavior is misplaced.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been studying this topic \u2013 sometimes called \u201csharenting\u201d<\/a> \u2013 for six years<\/a>. Too often, public discourse pits parents against children. Parents, critics say, are being narcissistic by blogging about their kids and posting their photos on Facebook and Instagram; they\u2019re willing to invade their child\u2019s privacy in exchange for attention and likes from their friends. So the story goes.<\/p>\n

But this parent-versus-child framing obscures a bigger problem: the economic logic of social media platforms that exploit users for profit.<\/p>\n

A natural impulse<\/h2>\n

Despite the heated responses sharenting can evoke, it\u2019s nothing new. For centuries, people have recorded daily minutiae in diaries and scrapbooks. Products like baby books explicitly invite parents to log information about their children.<\/p>\n

Communication scholar Lee Humphreys sees the impulse parents feel to document and share information about their kids as a form of \u201cmedia accounting<\/a>.\u201d Throughout their lives, people occupy many roles \u2013 child, spouse, parent, friend, colleague. Humphreys argues that one way to perform these roles is by documenting them. Looking back on these traces can help people shape a sense of self, construct a coherent life story and feel connected to others.<\/p>\n

\"\"
To share photographs of your kids is to be human.<\/span>
\npxhere<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If you\u2019ve ever thumbed through an old yearbook, a grandparent\u2019s travel photos or a historical figure\u2019s diary, you\u2019ve looked at media accounts. Same if you\u2019ve scrolled through a blog\u2019s archives or your Facebook Timeline. Social media may be fairly new, but the act of recording everyday life is age-old.<\/p>\n

Writing about family life online can help parents<\/a> express themselves creatively and connect with other parents. Media accounting can also help people make sense of their identities as a parent. Being a parent \u2013 and seeing yourself as a parent \u2013 involves talking and writing about your children.<\/p>\n

Surveillance capitalism enters the equation<\/h2>\n

Framed this way, it becomes clear why telling parents to stop blogging or posting about their children online is a challenging proposition. Media accounting is central to people\u2019s social lives, and it\u2019s been happening for a long time.<\/p>\n

But the fact that parents are doing it on blogs and social media does raise unique issues. Family album photos don\u2019t transmit digital data and become visible only when you decide to show them to someone, whereas those Instagram pictures sit on servers owned by Facebook and are visible to anyone who scrolls through your profile.<\/p>\n

Children\u2019s opinions matter, and if a child vehemently opposes sharenting, parents could always consider using paper diaries or physical photo albums. Parents can take other steps<\/a> to manage their children\u2019s privacy, such as using a pseudonym for their child and giving their child veto power over content.<\/p>\n

However, debates about privacy and sharenting often focus on a parent\u2019s followers or friends seeing the content. They tend to ignore what corporations do with that data. Social media didn\u2019t cause parents to engage in media accounting, but it has profoundly altered the terms by which they do so.<\/p>\n

Unlike the diary entries, photo albums and home videos of yore, blog posts, Instagram photos and YouTube videos reside in platforms owned by corporations and can be made visible to far more people than most parents realize or expect.<\/p>\n

The problem is less about parents and more about social media platforms. These platforms increasingly operate according to an economic logic that business scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls \u201csurveillance capitalism<\/a>.\u201d They produce goods and services designed to extract enormous amounts of data from individuals, mine that data for patterns, and use it to influence people\u2019s behavior.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t have to be this way. In her book<\/a> on media accounting, Humphreys mentions that in its early days, Kodak exclusively developed its customers\u2019 film.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile Kodak processed millions of customer photos,\u201d Humphreys writes, \u201cthey did not share that information with advertisers in exchange for access to their customers. \u2026 In other words, Kodak did not commodify its users.\u201d<\/p>\n

Social media platforms do just that. Sharenting tells them what your child looks like, when she was born, what she likes to do, when she hits her developmental milestones and more. These platforms pursue a business model predicated on knowing users \u2013 perhaps more deeply than they know themselves \u2013 and using that knowledge to their own ends.<\/p>\n

Against this backdrop, the concern is less that parents talk about their kids online and more that the places where parents spend time online are owned by companies who want access to every corner of our lives.<\/p>\n

In my view, that\u2019s the privacy problem that needs fixing.\"The<\/p>\n

Priya C. Kumar<\/a>, PhD Candidate in Information Studies, University of Maryland<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Priya C. Kumar, University of Maryland In a recent essay published in The Washington Post, a mother explained her decision to continue writing essays and blog posts about her daughter even after the girl had protested. The woman said that while she felt bad, she was \u201cnot done exploring my motherhood in my writing.\u201d One […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":15235,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293],"tags":[483,3385,488,5837,3832,1034,4058,525,5838,702],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15236"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15236"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15249,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15236\/revisions\/15249"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}