Do you know what "oversharenting" is? According to a recent
Wall Street Journal column, it’s parenting plus sharing a lot of your parenting - images of your children growing up, cutesy moments and the ones that might make them blush when they’re older.
http://on.wsj.com/K8TMIO Parents are taking the time to respond to Steven Leckart, the article’s author, who has decided to refrain from defining his son's Web presence within his own online networks.
Says Leckart:
“I’m less concerned with why parents use social media or what they may get from of it, than how they're using it and how this choice might affect kids, especially as we've watched Facebook grow from a novelty to multibillion-dollar stalwart.”
Leckart’s one of those early adopters of such things as Flickr, Friendster (remember that?! I don’t) MySpace (yes, people still use that), Foursquare, Facebook and a few other networks, he writes.
But as to what and how much presence his son should have in the vast social media landscape - that choice should be left to his son, Leckart writes.
“It's not that I want my son to remain hidden from the world. I just want him to inherit a decision instead of a list of passwords and default settings,” he writes.
I haven’t any children, but if I did and transferred my philosophy of life disclosure by web to my rearing of them, it would look something like this: nonexistent or, on an especially voluble day, very sparse. But that’s me being a very private person. Laughing at myself, I probably keep private a lot of things that are absolutely pointless to keep private to an on a need-to-know and close friend basis.
Nevertheless the article brings up a great topic about what we share of our (your) children’s lives. What’s just right, whether there is a ‘just right’ and when does sharing become oversharing. Why, before, such things as Facebook were baby photos reserved for hallway walls? Was this choice a matter of what forums were available to disseminate our joys at the time or something intentional?
Safety is no doubt a chief concern. Parents are given the opportunity to opt-their children out of publicity shots at schools, say ‘no’ to the media if they don’t want their son or daughter featured – and rightfully so. But when the choice is in mom and dad’s hand…or USB cord as to what images and videos to share and which to stow, there is the question about whether the rationale is different.
"Is this real life?"Leckart mentions the video below featuring a loopy David come from the dentist office. The clip has since spawned a website with parodies and David After Dentist gear. From the sounds of it, the video is a line Leckart is not interested in ever arriving to.
At the end of it, sharing is a person-to-person value judgment. TODAY Moms Contributor Dana Macario lit into the ‘sharenting article complaining about why parents should be the ones targeted for oversharing
(http://bit.ly/KX5zWr), defending her right as a proud mother to share whatever she darn well pleased. The sharing is just for her friends, anyway, she writes.
But where do you stand on this issue of parenting in the age of uberconnectivity and share activity? Are the latest advances ones that, in their inevitably, parents shouldn’t think too hard about and adapt to what looks like the new norm, or are reason for pause, to take a step back and discriminate between what the world can ‘like’ and ‘pin’ and what should remain within the privacy of the family room.
Be back soon.
