It's a decision any surveillance-conscious parent is forced to make early on in the child-rearing process: to blog, or not to blog?
Or, for that matter, to tweet, to status-update, to Instagram (as Jessica Simpson did with her son Ace, above), and everything else — to be in complete control of your child's earliest online persona, to be responsible for how they appear online when they don't have a choice one way or another.
The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal wrote in an essay last week that he recently had to make this choice, though his pre-fatherhood self was pretty convinced that Baby Alexis would never appear on the Internet.
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"When I used to see parents post photographs of their babies on Twitter, I'd cringe, imagining the facial recognition algorithms as laser beams scanning their child's still unformed features," he wrote. "Now, I'm like, 'Awwwww' — not just because all kids are now cute to me and this is a legally required reaction — but because I'm jealous that they feel comfortable popping the kid out there."
All of his concerns about the dangers of the Internet nearly went out the window when he realized how cute his own kid is, and how much he wants to share that with the world in pictures. (Personally, as someone who's generally "meh" on children to begin with, I've always been of the mind that babies are like dreams: far more interesting to the person who had them than to anyone else.)
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Luckily, though, Madrigal reminded himself of his principals, even if he's had to modify them somewhat. He might post "observations" about his child here and there, but he's still letting his baby live a mostly offline life for now.
Read the whole essay here. (The Atlantic)
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