No photos please
Lately, my Facebook feed is a ghost town. I don’t mean that no one posts on it anymore, just that when I scroll through it, I get no information from it. There are tons of political rants, random people selling pyramid scheme cosmetics (as a side note, if you have not listened to The Dream podcast on multi-level marketing, you are in for an enormous treat), and endless selfies. It’s empty social calories.
There’s very little content I actually care about. All the things that are most important to me don’t surface there: babies, life events, interesting conversations, actual emotion. And, all of my closest friends are no longer on Facebook - we keep in touch via text message and email.
I’m not alone. Some millennials are starting to leave large, open social networks in favor of the safety and warmth of small groups, which may be one reason why Zuck is all-in on Whatsapp and Messenger, promising privacy and regulation at the chat level.
I’ve written before,
As big internet becomes more threatening, people are turning inwards. How?
First, they’re setting up ahem newsletters. Newsletters are, although also a viral risk, strangely intimate. It’s you talking to a single person in their inbox. They’re also longer-form than Twitter. They allow for arguments, for room to think.
The second way people are turning to “small i internet” is chat groups. Facebook and Twitter have become extremely noisy. Where they’ve failed, Telegram, Slack, Whatsapp, and iMessage have stepped in.
This is slowly becoming clear for millennial parents, as well. In a recent piece, Katie Notopoulos, who watches internet trends, writes,
A decade ago, digitally aware parents would lock down Gmail address and Twitter handles for their new babies in the second trimester, squatting in anticipation of Junior’s first emails. Lifestyle blogging was at its peak, and sharing a baby’s first steps and diaper blowouts seemed normal.
Kids born 10 years ago are now googling themselves, shocked to discover the digital traces their parents have left about them. Young parents today aren’t just living in a post-Dooce world, they’re in a post–Cambridge Analytica world — worried about the vast and unknowable reams of data that tech companies collect. In France, parents can even be thrown in jail for posting pictures of their kids online without their consent.
Parent bloggers now announce they will no longer post photos of their kids (creating content out of that decision). Privacy experts are warning against posting photos or public information about children. And more and more often, parents are deciding not just to limit social media posts of their kids — but to post none at all.
I don’t post pictures of my own kids on public social media, but I’m in the extreme outliers of this trend. What I have seen more broadly, and what I think we’ll see a lot more of, is the oblique child: people still wanting to share pictures of their kids, but not to such an extent as to leave them entirely up for public consumption.
Mindy Kaling does this extremely well:
Most recently, I’ve seen this from Bryce Harper, a baseball player who made a huge buzz when he started playing for the Phillies. (I don’t know anything about sportstball but this was a Huge Deal in Philadelphia.)
He and his wife, Kayla, recently welcomed a baby boy, and this is the announcement picture they posted on their Instagram:
I love it. It so clearly shows everything the public could be interested in - all the stats, the trappings of new parenthood, the hospital room. On the one hand, the viewer feels like they’re right in the action with them. At the same time, the couple completely maintaining the baby’s privacy. The viewer feels both included, and respectful of the distance between them and the new family. The other genius thing is that they posted it several days after the baby was born, giving them space and time to frame their family’s narrative instead of releasing pictures immediately.
It’s very well done and I’ll be keeping my eye on this trend. Privacy will be the biggest status symbol of the next generation. Now that celebrities are starting to demand it, it’s only a matter of time before it moves into the public opinion (I hope.)
Art: Virgin and Child, Rogier van der Weyden 1454
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About the Author and Newsletter
I’m a data scientist in Philadelphia. This newsletter is about tech topics I don’t see covered in the media, but would like to. Most of my free time is spent kid-wrangling, reading, and writing bad tweets. I also have longer opinions on things. Find out more here or follow me on Twitter.
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