“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
― Robert F. Kennedy

Friday, 1 March 2013

The Next Next Generation

Imagine growing up and all your baby pictures are not only stacked up in your parents entrance hall, but also every picture of every burp and embarrassing thing you've ever done is posted on your mom’s Facebook timeline and all over the rest of the internet. Now everything you have ever done is on display for the world to see, either captured in a picture or a status. If you Google yourself, you can find your whole life on the internet. This is not something we think about. But it is a reality our kids are going to face.

I personally think that our little act of entertainment will screw up our children royally. I have previously said that we all broadcast too much of ourselves – but we also broadcast too much of those that are entrusted to us. Imagine reading a blog your mom or dad wrote in their 20’s. Our kids are going to grow up with it. They are going to be able to find out what we were doing when we were in our 20 somethings, by scrolling down our Facebook timeline, reading our tweets, etc.

Post responsibly. Once you posted something on the internet you can’t ever really fully delete it. Our tech savvy kids will be able to dig it up. They will see your drunken party pictures, judge you by your profile pictures, see how many people you dated and when. Your whole youth will be out there, for them and their friends to see and for them to call you on. No hiding that you were also a person before you became a parent (I of course grew up with the notion that my parents were never young, they've just always been parents, and have only recently found out that they had lives before they had kids, shocker!).

Will they be more popular in school because of the amount of likes their baby page has? What happens to the kid who has no Facebook page of his or her own, created by their loving mom? Is he/she immediately labelled an outcast?

You might think that these things are cute now, and easier than sending Christmas cards with photo updates, but think about the long run. I personally don't want to see pictures of me as a baby in a bathtub on the internet, and I don't know that many people that will want to.

I think my generation are producing some messed up kids. Facebook is not your personal family album! Think before you post!
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