“Jade, I have got together with a few of the girls and we are all SO OVER your running commentary of your life and every single thing Addy does. We all have kids that we are besotted with – guess what – every parent thinks their kid is the best ever.” When Jade Ruthven first opened the handwritten envelope that came through her mailbox in Perth, Western Australia, she was, she says, very excited at first, thinking it was an invite.
So it came as a bit of a shock to read a letter imploring her to stop posting updates about her baby on Facebook:
“She wears a new outfit – well take a photo and send it PRIVATELY to the person who gave it to her – not to everyone!!!! She crawls off the mat – we DON’T care!!!!! She’s 6 months old – BIG DEAL!!!! Stop and think – if every mother posted all that crap about their kid – I’m sure you’d get over it pretty quickly. We can’t wait for you to get back to work – maybe you won’t have time to be on Facebook quite so much.”
At first, the 33-year-old dental hygienist thought the letter must be a joke: “I read it and re-read it about four times. I was shaking with anger and shock to think a so-called friend of mine could be so heartless and gutless to not even sign their name.” Gutless, indeed – and after the letter was made public via comedian Em Rusciano, to whom Jade sent a copy, the public outpouring of support was clear – and rightly so, because not only is it harsh, but not to sign your names? Yet, around the world, there will also be men and women – childless and otherwise – who will be shouting at their screens with glee.
And you know what? As one who has spent the past four and a half years littering friends’ news feed with pictures of my own beloveds in various beguiling poses – not to mention writing a column charting my kids’ every move for public consumption – I get it: we’re a pest. In the throes of new motherhood, there is a greater power that compels a number of us to overshare on a scale that might legally be defined as aggressive, and for those on the receiving end, it’s dull at best. Because for many people, even the most doting parents, other people’s kids … yawn.
Certainly after the birth of my first baby, which was before any of my friends had kids of their own and therefore before I’d experienced what it is like to see a new mum’s constant social updates, I was particularly prone to sharing pictures of my daughter in a range of poses: here she is dribbling while dressed as a penguin; and now, death-staring the camera while propped against a pillow.
By the time the second one came around, and my self-awareness levels had risen slightly, I tried to temper my uploading – generally confining images to those I could pass off as funny rather than saccharine cute, which somehow feels less imposing. Indeed, by the time I became pregnant with my third, I even felt embarrassed announcing its imminent arrival (though I still did, I’m not that restrained).
There are many compelling reasons why we shouldn’t excessively post pics of our children – or other people’s – online, not least online security issues and moral questions surrounding objectifying kids before they are old enough to give their consent. But sometimes, even for the most enlightened, asking us to refrain is a bit like telling a nicotine addict they shouldn’t smoke.
Ultimately, though, pictures of other people’s children (which, I should say, I actually quite enjoying browsing through; it makes a nice contrast to the endless horrors that surround us on 24-hour news) are only a fraction of annoying online behaviour. The fact is that people are annoying narcissists, and social media only serves to exacerbate our most irritating qualities. For some, this is revealed in endless updates on their latest meal, images of toes protruding from under blue skies in shameless holiday pics, or of banging nights out on the town. There are the endless Buzzfeed linkers, the emotional oversharers, and those prone to constant moments of spiritual enlightenment. Then there are those for whom a small child – and their every passing move – is their achilles heel.
And that’s just life, or at least that’s life online. So what can we really expect if we choose to have a social media account and then befriend every passing stranger we’ve ever made eye contact with (speaking personally), other than a stream of total nonsense sporadically interspersed by an interesting post from an actual friend?
If we are so incensed by the constant invasion of mundane crap that infiltrates our screens, , maybe the thing to do would be to delete our accounts and make the effort to keep in contact with the considerably fewer people with whom we have a genuine rapport in the real world. Perhaps those whose kids we’d be quite happy to see pics of. Or, if you’re Jade, find out who wrote (but didn’t sign) that note and defriend them in real life.
