I finally saw the documentary Catfish the other night. In case you missed it, it’s a creepy/fascinating true story about a dude in NYC who strikes up a relationship with a family of rural Michigan artists over the web and falls in love with the 19 year old daughter, only to discover that (SPOILER ALERT!) he was actually corresponding with a St. Bernard puppy the entire time!
Jk on that last part… I don’t want to ruin the movie for you. It’s actually worth seeing, if only to put in perspective the more disturbing pitfalls inherent in our Tweeting, Flickring, Facebooking, Brave New Bloggy World. The film wigged me out especially since I just started this blog, and I’m still determining what the heck I plan to do with it.
Yes, I devised DoubleFab to chronicle — among other things — my adventures as a new wife and mom. And sure, I hope to appeal to a readership beyond my circle of friends and acquaintances. If you’ll allow me an over-earnest moment, I genuinely like the idea of building community on the web. I’ve benefited from reading the blogs of indulgently candid strangers — picking up useful parenting advice and perspectives, a sense of camaraderie, or at the very least, a welcome breather from the daily grind.
On the other hand, some common parenting blog practices rub me the wrong way. For example, I have an irrational disinclination to post pics of my unborn child on the internet. I say irrational because I can’t clearly explain why this feels so off-putting to me. I’m proud as peaches about our adorable ultrasound pics, and I forwarded them to a long list of friends and family over email. And when my friends post their ultrasounds on their Facebook pages, I honestly love pouring over the shots and trying to figure out if the little guy has her nose and his chin, or if that’s just a roving umbilical cord.
Who is this baby? Only Google knows.
But when it comes to my own pics, I balk. All I can say is there’s something weird to me about a baby popping up on Facebook before he takes his first breath on planet earth. He’ll have his entire life to grow a Google tail — the least I can do is spare him some privacy in utero.
Extending that logic forward, I have major mixed feelings about how much of my child’s life to share on this blog. Given my warm and fuzzy feelings for his fetal glamour shots, I know I’m going to think he’s the cutest baby on the entire procreating planet. And I’ll probably start to feel like it’s my parental duty to share his preternatural good looks with the world. But! What about that roving band of dark and sinister Internet cliches: the Online Perverts? Forgive me my motherly anxiety, but The Online Perverts are real! They happened to this mother! Or potentially some of these people!
Even if your digital data escapes the clutches of the Pervs, you still have the Random Weirdos to contend with. And there’s absolutely no predicting what the Random Weirdos will do with your child’s photos once they’ve found them on Google; their motives range from innocent to bizzarre. For example, a schizophrenic could appropriate your entire Facebook cadre as her own, a la Catfish. (Shucks! I gave it away). Or some rando could turn a pic of your son in a yoda costume at Halloween into his blog banner.
In the most extreme cases, your baby could go viral, turning your kid into an international icon in Japan and a tattoo on David Beckham’s torso, as infamously happened to this Gainesville, Florida father. (In a cinematic twist, that dad works as a an information technology expert at the University of Florida, and he’s blasé enough about web culture to take it all in stride).
Meet Aka San (Japanese for "Mr. Baby"). Would you freak out if this was your kid?
You can blame my conflicting feelings as a budding mom blogger for why DoubleFab is so all over the map in terms of content so far. It’s one thing to share roast chicken recipes, and quite another to live blog your baby’s birth (although by some definition, I suppose both qualify as fair mom blog fodder). I’d love your thoughts on what you’d like to read as I continue to document this ride, even though given my predilections I’ll likely fall on the more conservative end of the spectrum.
But lest you feel cheated out of juicy domestic secrets, know this: I’m not really a Bay Area mom-to-be. I’m actually a St. Bernard puppy.
Nice post, Eliza!!!! Well said! The thing I worry about even more than the appropriation of various baby images by weird strangers is just the fact that once our kids grow up, they’ll already have been spoken for– they won’t have the chance to find their own voices, because we’ve already sort of defined them to the whole world wide web. I mean ultimately, they’re not OUR babies… they’re just people, right? Will the whole “mommy blogger” phenomenon last through our kids’ teen years? Or will we just at some point lose interest? (and delete what we’ve created so far, if that’s even possible)
I totally relate to what you’ve said here and I deleted and restarted my own blog a dozen times fueled by many of the same points you’ve made. Ultimately I decided that there are far more pure-hearted, genuinely interested baby blog readers than there are perverts out there. For my own blog, I try to keep certain details private, like where exactly we live (I simply live in “the LA area”… which is a vast piece of real estate, as you know), and the moment I encounter a real-life perv, I’ll probably shut down my blog or at least make it invite-only. And I plan to stop blogging about my kids by the time they’re in Kindergarten, and at that point let them create their own identities and voices.
I’m loving your blog, btw! Keep up the good work… at least until that baby comes. You’ll be so busy then you might not even have the option of exposing your progeny to the entire world wide web.
i think those are some very valid concerns. personally, i feel pretty comfortable disclosing my own thoughts/opinions/actions, etc. with the online world, because like you, i have found it to be both catharic and much appreciated when others do it. but i don’t view my child (or my husband, for that matter) as an extension of myself in a way that i am similarly entitled to share openly on their behalf. i think it’s good to want to draw a line somewhere. and as you say, this is a mom blog, which makes you the subject matter, not baby. i like what andi said above, “their not OUR babies, their just people…”, and i think that really helps create a natural distinction. i wouldn’t blog exclusively or intimately about any other person (that’d be kinda weird), so why would i do it about my kid?
Yeah man, privacy is tricky on the internet. There’s always a severely unhinged person in Scotland with a *very* specific agenda who wants you six feet underground. Well not you. But I heard it happens to some people.
I wouldn’t worry too much though. Pervs have so many baby blogs to choose from, the likelihood of them choosing yours is slim to none.
Can you adopt a St. Bernard puppy please? <3
I shared the blog post with my writer’s network and someone passed this Demetri Martin graphic back to me. It’s kinda perfect.
http://www.bite.ca/bitedaily/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Interest-in-Your-Kids.jpg
I love this conversation. Thanks for your thoughts, folks!
A good dose of paranoia is very healthy. Myself, I tend to overshare on facebook (though I justify it with the fact that I’m so far away from everyone and want them to see her pics), though I do plan on calming things down now that she’s getting older and will soon have more understanding of the internets than her old mum. And she’s so going to hate me for the fetus pics.