In a recent article published in The Washington Post, a mother explained her decision to continue writing articles and blog posts about her daughter even after the girl had complained about it. The author said that although she felt bad, "I had not finished exploring my motherhood in my writings."
One of the comments criticized the type of parents as the author of the article that "turned their family's everyday dramas into content," while another comment claimed that the woman's article highlights the "continuous and tedious debate between parents. in the era of Instagram: What we publish now in the networks will mortify our children in the future?"
These questions are legitimate and I have published a study on the need for parents protect your children's privacy online. I agree with those who criticize the author for ignoring her own daughter's concerns.
However, I believe that the general criticism of parents and their use of social networks is not entirely justified.
I have been studying this subject (also known in English as "sharenting") for six years and it is very common to see how public opinion tries to put parents against their children. According to the critics, parents have a narcissistic attitude when they talk about their children on the Internet and publish their photos on the networks, since they have no qualms about invading their children's privacy to changes in the attention and validation of their friendships. Or at least in theory.
However, this "parents against children" approach makes us forget a major problem: the economic interests of social networks that use users for their benefit.
In Babies and more, did you record your child's end-of-year festival? Think about it before sharing the images of other children on social networksA natural impulse
Despite the heated speeches caused by parents' publications on the networks, it is nothing new. People have been recording their minutiae in newspapers and scrapbooks for centuries. There are special books where parents are encouraged to record all kinds of information about their children.
Communication expert Lee Humphreys believes that the parental drive to document and share information about children is a form of "multimedia records." Throughout their lives, people have different roles (son, partner, father, friend, colleague) and according to Humphreys one way to perform those roles is documenting them. When people go back to the remains of the past they can create an image of their person, building a coherent biography that provides a sense of connection with other people.
Sharing pictures of your children is human. pxhere
If you have ever looked at an old school yearbook, travel photos of a grandfather or the diary of a historical character, what you have done has been to investigate a multimedia record of your time as when you dedicate yourself to look at the profile of a person's Facebook. Social networks may be a recent phenomenon, but documenting everyday events is millenary.
Writing about family life can help parents express themselves creatively and connect with other parents. Social media accounts can also help people to understand your role as parents, since being a father and seeing yourself as a father implies talking and writing about your children.
Vigilant capitalism appears on the scene
Put that way, it is clear why asking parents to stop talking about their children on the networks and uploading photos can be a challenge: documenting what happens to us is a central part of people's social life and has been that way since long time ago.
But the fact that parents do it through blogs and social networks leads to concrete problems. The family photo albums we have at home do not transmit digital data and are only visible when we decide to show them to someone, while Instagram photos are found on servers owned by Facebook and are visible to anyone who scrolls your profile.
In Babies and more, what is behind the mothers who share more photos of their children on Facebook?The opinions of children matter and if a child categorically objects to having their photos shared, parents can always consider the use of paper diaries or analogue photo albums. Parents can also take other measures to guarantee the privacy of their children, such as using a pseudonym for their children or giving them veto power over the content.
However, discussions about privacy and the way in which parents share content related to their children often focus on people who can see the content and it is often ignored what companies do companies with that data.
Social networks have not made parents want to document parts of their lives, but they have profoundly altered the way they do.Unlike the newspapers, photo albums and home videos of yesteryear, blog posts, Instagram photos and YouTube videos are hosted on corporate-owned platforms and they can become visible to many more people than most parents realize or wish.
The problem is not so much parents but social media platforms, since they are increasingly based on economic terms, what business expert Shoshana Zuboff calls "surveillance capitalism." These platforms produce goods and services designed to collect huge amounts of data from individuals, analyze them for trends and use them to influence people's behavior.
It does not have to be this way. In his book on how we record what happens to us in different media, Humphreys mentions that in the beginning Kodak was the only company that revealed the reels of its customers.
"Although Kodak processed millions of photos of its customers," Humphreys writes, "it did not share that information with its sponsors in exchange for access to its customers. In other words, Kodak did not convert its customers into products."
That is precisely what social media platforms do. Social media posts tell parents what their child is like, when he was born, what he likes to do, when he reaches certain stages of development, etc. These platforms pursue a business model based on knowing users (perhaps more deeply than they know themselves) and using such knowledge for their own purposes.
In this context, the problem is not that parents talk about their children on the Internet, but that the places where parents spend their time connected are owned by companies that want to have access to every corner of our lives.In my opinion, that is the privacy problem that we should fix.
Author: Priya C. Kumar, PhD student in Information Studies, University of Maryland
This article has originally been published in The Conversation. You can read the original article here.
Translated by Silvestre Urbón
