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| | Introduction
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< | I can’t say precisely which part of the Internet generation I belong to. What I do know is that the chatroom in my freshman year in high school was mIRC. There was no Facebook in my country during my first year in law school. I got my first smart phone in 2010. Perhaps I can say I belong to that portion where crafting digital identities wasn’t what drove us for the majority of our lives. So far. This is the forgotten privilege. To be able to even say that this wasn’t what it used to be. To remember with clarity a past where freedom was the norm. This can never be replicated in any generation but should be rightfully envied. |
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> | I can say I’m proud to be part of the human race that wasn’t born in the internet age. I can say I’m prouder to be part of the human race that was ignorant of social media until the last 1/3 of my life. I feel privileged that crafting digital identities wasn’t my preoccupation the majority of my life so far. I feel extraordinarily lucky to have experienced digital freedom at some point. And I feel magnanimously special to know that my kind can never be replicated in any generation. But once upon a time, a choice has been made to enter the social media universe. |
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| | Rise of the Digital Native Parents and Their Village
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| | Rise of the Digital Native Parents and Their Village
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< | Fast forward to a decade after creating my first social media account, I am now a relatively new mom. Yes, I have photos of her on my social media. Yes, her first digital footprint is an ultrasound photo. And yes, I joined a parenting group in Facebook. It’s surprising how the landscape changed once those first social media inhabitants became the first generation parents giving birth inside this network. It was like whiplash of baby photos, baby stories, and parenting advice, solicited or not. What did we do at the advent of this phenomena? We embraced it. We congratulated the parents, waited for gender-reveals, welcomed the tiny humans, celebrated birthdays, and also mourned a few of the little angels. We created a community. One that at first we loved to be in because we felt we needed help from others and to help others. We needed a place where we feel welcome to enjoy (or not) the journey. After all, they say raising a child takes a village. It was a new avenue to build our social capital. But it didn’t end there, as what always happens in the social media world.
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> | Fast forward a decade after, I am now a parent to a two-year-old. Yes, I have photos of her on my social media. Yes, I cringe when I’m reminded of the cliché that is her first digital footprint: an ultrasound photo. And yes, I joined a more enduring cliché: a parenting group in Facebook. Words can’t quite capture the experience of witnessing the dawn that ushered the first social media inhabitants into the chaos that is parenthood. It was like whiplash of baby photos, baby stories, and parenting advice. But we embraced the phenomena. We congratulated each other, waited for gender-reveals, welcomed the tiny humans, celebrated birthdays, and also mourned a few little angels. We created a community. One that we first loved because we felt we needed each other’s help. We needed a place we feel welcomed to enjoy (or not) the journey. After all, they say raising a child takes a village. |
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< | Competition of the Best
We also created a consciousness to create a parenting legacy. Because if we weren’t successful in our first quest to be relevant, we now turn our efforts in creating legacies as new parents. The community we love, where we wanted to feel safe as we fumble in our new roles, now became one that we felt we needed to shine and be experts in. It is now one of the environments that give us anxiety to perform our best. |
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> | Whether this “village” was a safe place was never a concern. Until the consciousness to create a parenting legacy began. A competition of competence replaced the competition to be relevant. Who can create the best legacies as new parents? It was no longer safe to fumble in our new roles because now we felt we needed to shine and be experts in parenting. We became anxious to always perform our best. |
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"Sharenting" and The Anxiety of Forgetting
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< | Parental sharing or “Sharenting,” means “the practice of a parent who regularly uses the social media to communicate a lot of detailed information about their child.” Why do parents do it? There are a lot of reasons aside from the organic want to just share. One answer is the highlight of my current internal debate. It is also my answer to the question “Why is there a need to divide attention?” I share photos of my child in social media because it creates a detailed photo album I can access anywhere and anytime. It’s hard to detach because I need to preserve memories and the quickest medium is my phone. I find that the anxiety of forgetting is the hardest to navigate. I tried to rationalize the reason why I posted more photos in the past three months than in the first six months of this year combined. The justification? I’m in New York for my LLM year and this is the first and only time I will ever get to experience living outside the Philippines with my child. I want to never forget the memories.
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> | Parental sharing or “Sharenting” means “the practice of a parent who regularly uses the social media to communicate a lot of detailed information about their child.” Why do parents do it? There are a lot of reasons aside from the organic want to just share. One answer is the highlight of my current internal struggle. I say I share photos of my child in social media because it creates a detailed and highly accessible photo album. I feel the need to preserve memories and the anxiety of forgetting is extremely hard to navigate. I know I posted more photos than ever since arriving in New York. I tried justifying that I want to never forget the memories of my LLM year, the only time I will ever get to experience living outside the Philippines with my child. |
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Here begins the conundrum. One-third of those posts are of my child in places she has yet to understand outside the basic knowledge that the building is of a blue woman, some have big screens, and one has an animal she knows is a bear. If I am just commemorating memories, it begs the question: whose memories? Do they belong to my child or mine? Are they both ours? |
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> | But why post the photos at all? Photos of her in places she has yet to understand and most often won’t remember. It begs the question: whose memories am I preserving? Do they belong to her alone or mine or both of us? The sad truth is, my other foot is still squarely planted in that village I no longer feel safe in but still want parenthood validation from. |
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The Power of Choice: A Parent's Gift
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< | Stacy Steinberg, in her article “Sharenting: Children's Privacy in the Age of Social Media,” stated that this is exactly the conflict at the heart of parenting in social media. The stories of children, especially young ones, are intrinsically connected to their parents’ that it naturally means parents end up creating their children’s digital footprint without them having consented from the beginning. There is now a conflict between balancing parents’ interest in sharing as part of free speech and protecting children’s privacy rights. But stating the conflict this way is making it too legalese that others might just gloss over the problem and say “leave it to the law.” I believe there is no conflict. Conflict presupposes the two rights are equal and they shouldn’t be. Even if one argues otherwise, we all learned in law school that freedom of speech is not absolute, it has limits. If we can’t do away with Sharenting, then setting the limit is imperative. |
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> | Stacy Steinberg, in her article “Sharenting: Children's Privacy in the Age of Social Media,” stated that this is exactly the conflict at the heart of parenting in social media. The stories of children, especially young ones, are intrinsically connected to their parents’ that it becomes hard to separate the digital identity of the child from the parent. Parents end up creating their children’s digital footprint without them having consented from the beginning. It now becomes a conflict between balancing parents’ free speech and protecting children’s privacy rights. I believe that in viewing this as a moral question rather than legal, it is easy to see that there is no conflict. Conflict presupposes the two rights are equal and they shouldn’t be. Even if one argues otherwise, freedom of speech is not absolute, it has limits. If we can’t do away with Sharenting, then setting the limit is imperative. |
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< | One solution is respecting boundaries as the new norm. As one article suggests, ask the question: “Have I crossed the boundary?” We are always free to create our own digital identities, but when we do so as parents with children as our stars, we are also cementing their own digital footprints from even before coming out of the womb. Those will last forever until children start having friends, finding dates, looking for colleges and jobs. The young ones are not even aware nor can object. It is beyond unfair that they don’t get to choose the foundation of their digital presence and the level of surveillance we unknowingly and unwittingly permit on their behalf. We had the privilege of choice, even though the wisdom of that choice might not be clear now that we know what we now know. We, as the first generation of parents with kids born in the age of social media, have the unique privilege of having the knowledge of the past. The best gift we could give is the power of choice. An informed one this time.
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> | In my case the limit is safety. It’s immensely disheartening to realize that I’m still affected by how other “villagers” see me as a parent. It’s also disgustingly hypocritical that I perpetuate the illusion that emotional and mental safety still exist. But my child’s safety is more paramount than surviving my own battle with detachment. One solution suggested is to ask the question: “Have I crossed the boundary?” Set boundaries to control what others see and interpret. If they are old enough, the boundary should be their own comfort and consent. If they are young ones, then the boundary should be their safety. When we post as parents, keep in mind that we are cementing not just our children’s digital footprints that follow them when they start making friends, finding dates, looking for colleges and jobs. We are also placing them in the interpretative hands of people who are not invested in their safety and wellbeing. More than ever we have to keep them safe. Safe in their freedom to act without fear of being known to the world they’re not aware of. Safe in making choices and meeting consequences of their own making. |
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> | We were presented of a choice once, when we were ignorant of the possibilities. Now, we have the unique privilege of having the knowledge of the past. The best gift we could give our children is the power of choice. It could be a choice between having freedom to be unknown or having control of their interpreted narrative. We have to accept that the choice is not ours to make. |
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< | I think the first step in improvement here would be to tighten the
existing prose, which is well-organized at large scale, but not
economically written. There are many sentences that don't pay their
freight. "But stating the conflict this way is making it too
legalese that others might just gloss over the problem and say
'leave it to the law,'" is one such example. You mean, I think,
that this is an ethical and moral rather than predominantly legal
issue. A dozen words can do the work of two or three sentences more
than once in the existing draft.
With the space thus gained, you can do more thinking. Professor
Agnes Callard's recent essay in the New York Times on the subject shows some of the
possibilities, I think.
I'm curious why the last paragraph doesn't say that you've changed
your behavior according to the precepts laid out in the essay. The
argument that you want to have photographs to preserve your own
memories of your time in the US doesn't constitute the slightest
justification for publishing them. It seems to me that the next
draft should at least deal with the gap in the argument, and the
resulting distance between what you think is right and what you feel
you need to do. |
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