After watching a recent YouTube video of a topless toddler playing with a dead squirrel while her parents shifted between nausea and giggles, I began to wonder, is it about time we start an Oversharers Anonymous for people addicted to exploiting themselves and their children online?
Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. I remember the good old days when I was a kid, when being embarrassed by your parents meant that Mommy told a neighbor that you accidentally peed in their pool. It did not mean that they posted a video of you on the internet that can never really ever be removed, especially if it happens to go “viral.” And this is not like the virus spread by your preschool class, this is a virus that never goes away. Even if your parents remove the video, someone else has probably ripped it by now and is posting it on their account. And let’s just hope a blogger never got a hold of it! Hopefully, your face changes when you grow up, or your parents were at least smart enough to use a pseudonym when they posted that humiliating video of you before you were old enough to grab the digital camera from them and knock some sense into them.
Yes, babies are cute. Yes, your kid is cute. Yes, kids do weird things. Yes, you have a camera. Yes, it’s called YouTube, as in you can upload whatever you want, but parents, there is an option on YouTube to make your video “private,” just in case you wanted to share, say, a video of your topless daughter playing with an animal corpse to your friends and family. You can actually make it possible for only your ACTUAL friends and family to see this specimen of horror, as opposed to the whole wide world and the many pedophiles who have paid their cable bill. You might be familiar with the term “internet privacy” since you copied that enraged facebook status about the evil facebook corporation stealing your photos and selling them to the lower realms of hell, or whatever the latest status update is that people are passing around.
But you won’t make the videos private, because you are addicted to YouTube. While it’s a kick to have a chain of facebook comments confirming what you knew about the awesomeness of your child, it’s just not enough. These are people who “friended” you, and friends are supposed to say nice things. While it’s a kick to have people watch you on television for no other ability than for just being you, you still have to go to the audition to get that gig, and that just wastes gas. It’s a kick to have your child become a star without you ever even having to carpool to a casting director. It’s a kick to be a YouTube phenomenon, so against every parental instinct you have, despite the fact that you tell your child not talk to strangers, you go ahead and post that video to every schmuck in the world.
Or you are so accustomed to people sharing videos that you don’t even realize that you should keep some things private. I don’t know which is worse.
As someone who does not have a child, I actually adore watching cute videos and pictures of friends and family’s children whom I don’t get to see everyday. Because I’m, like, related to them and all.
DARYN
Loved this post! So much truth in it. Far too much over sharing by parents who are either a) so blinded by their love for their children that they don’t realize they have crossed the line or b) are hoping to use their child’s foibles to grab their own “15 minutes”.