This is something I’ve been thinking/reading about lately. Mostly reactions to this article about a freshly minted 14 year old on social media who was shocked about the content posted about her by family without her knowledge.

We have a generation of babies right now that will likely emerge as adults in a world with internet.

Babies with videos and images of themselves being assaulted by cheese, learning how to speak and walk. Babies growing up, throwing tantrums and asking questions all documented- sometimes in its entirety- on the internet.

I feel the compulsion interesting and understandable. It has only become very recently that families were able to do more than simply pull photos out from your wallet or purse. Now that we are able to share online, we will overshare. This leaves each person vulnerable. Imagine what this data is doing for machine learning.

We are watching the first generation of people with internet raising their children.

Right now, teenagers exist in the United States that have been entirely denied a private childhood, and I think that’s a problem.

Blogging around your children robs them of something that was afforded to you: the right to have some of their most intimate and vulnerable moments as humans exposed to the internet without consent.

I don’t think that posting a photo is a bad thing, but the volumes of data provided to huge platforms as Facebook and similar is a very scary thought. I would imagine the learning would become so successful that predictions can be made on virtually anything about a person if for example Facebook had data on them from birth to adulthood.

While it would be best to not post photos at all on the internet, I already posted my son’s newborn photo on this website. I’m excited for him to be a part of the rest of my life, and I don’t regret it. I am making a promise to him and to myself that it would be the last one. It’s hard, because he is extremely beautiful to me but this feels like the right way to go.

When he is able to understand what the internet is and tells me he wants to explore it, then we can catch back up. So far, there’s a lot of evidence to back up claims that too much internet access can cause or exacerbate depression.

I want to keep him informed about the opportunities that the internet can provide, as well as the dangers of it.

I want to teach him how to use the internet effectively.

This will be an interesting conversation as his father is not an “internet” person outside of youtube. I work online in the social media and advertising space. We both have vastly different and useful opinions on the internet to share. We also agree that the more time he spends in nature, the better off if will be.

I don’t make art enough these days to update the gallery, but I’m thinking about it. Life is tiring right now because little one is nearly 4 months old. I’ll draft something next weekend.

I hope you’ve noticed the work uploading more art on to this web page. I have a huge variety of work from photography to illustrations with pen to large scale mixed media/ acrylic paintings.

They span over a decade at least, so I’ve been entertaining the idea of respecting myself as an artist.

Not just as a slug of a woman.

With love,