As more and more of my Facebook friends reproduce, which is frightening, I'm noticing a trend that I'm honestly not sure whether to find frightening--people creating Facebook profiles for their newborns. On one level it makes sense and is a natural extension of social media culture, one that I could see myself indulging when I have a kid. You want to be able to clickably reference the people who matter to you, after all. There's a feeling these days that if you didn't tag it, it didn't happen. Making a profile for your new little person makes them a person in your online world too, and there's a feeling of completeness in being able to list them along with your other family members. And what a handy way to catalog and show off baby photos!
But. What on EARTH is going to happen to those profiles when the kid grows up? What will the social media habits of kids who have been on Facebook since birth look like? Kids are using the computer at incredibly young ages; when will they be granted the password to "their" account? Will they be able to friend their first grade classmates? Will younger and younger kids be meaner and meaner to each other in cyberspace? Will changing the password or even deletion be an act of teen rebellion? (If you were a teenager, would you keep an account that has 4,806 photos of you from birth through awkward phase and a bunch of Mom's old college friends who thought the page was cute? Or would you be too attached to it because at this point your whole life is on there, and nobody goes to that much effort to look up embarrassing old posts anyway because everybody has similar ones?) What will be their concept of privacy, if any? Will there be a backlash against the accepted culture of sharing and oversharing?
And most importantly, will they all stay off my lawn?
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