The Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism at Ohio State University recognizes a simple truth: that 'as more people get information from YouTube, Twitter and other non-traditional sources, newsrooms need journalists who understand how to tell compelling public affairs stories in cutting edge ways.' As a consequence, the program aims to train experienced journalists in marshaling social media to tell their stories. Where might those cutting-edge journalists come from? In the case of W.M. Kiplinger, namesake of the Kiplinger program, it was Ohio State's undergraduate program in journalism. But of course journalists can come from a broad range of undergraduate backgrounds. The bottom line is that universities house a number of undergraduate and graduate education and training programs for turning out professional journalists.
One caveat for that bottom line is that journalism is among the majors that appear regularly these days on lists of 'worst college majors' for your career and financial prospects. According to Forbes, the unemployment rate for recent journalism graduates is 7.7%, and the average salary for recent journalism grads is $32,000 a year.
This brings me to a recent Kiplinger.com article in the popular genre of 'worst college majors' for your career. Kiplinger is of course a major publishing company founded by W.M. Kiplinger, namesake of Ohio State's journalism fellows program, former journalism major. The ten very, very bad, bad college majors on the Kiplinger list are, in order:
10. English
9. sociology
8. drama and theater arts
7. liberal arts
6. studio arts
5. graphic design
4. philosophy and religious studies
3. film and photography
2. fine arts
1. anthropology
For some context, bearing in mind that journalism, not on the list, but the course of study that resulted in the modern-day entity known as Kiplinger.com, a very respectable and very lucrative business and finance news outlet, has a recent graduate unemployment rate of 7.7% and average starting salary $32,000, this Kiplinger article informs us that:
English majors (infamous number 10) who are recent grads have a lower unemployment rate (6.9) and a median starting salary of...$32,000. Drama and Theater Arts recent grads (infamous number 8) have an unemployment rate of 7.8% and median starting salary of $26,000. Notably, the Kiplinger article characterizes such circumstances as 'a brutal combination of low compensation and high unemployment.' Imagine what you could earn were you to major in one of Kiplinger's Ten Best College Majors for a Lucrative Career? If you majored in medical assisting services (laudatory number 10), your unemployment rate as a recent grad would be as low as 5.4%, and your median starting salary would be as high as $43,000 a year. Obviously majoring in medical assisting services over English is, for Kiplinger, a no-brainer. And journalism? I'm sure good old W.M. Kiplinger himself would have traded his journalism training for a guaranteed more lucrative career in medical assisting services, or management information systems (laudatory number 9), or construction services (laudatory number 8), or medical technologies (laudatory number 7). If I'm reading correctly: if your major has the word 'services,' 'technology,' or 'systems' in it, you're good to go. If your major has the word 'arts' in it, you're fucked.
To this point I've put aside the fact that many of these 'majors' are actually just buzzwords and assemblages of actual courses of study that in many cases bear little relationship to actual college programs. 'Philosophy and Religious Studies,' for example, sounds great if your purpose is to write an article demeaning non-vocational majors; but philosophy and religion are usually and broadly two different majors that feed into two very different career paths. Likewise it's easy to lump 'medical assisting services' into one big category, as though training in a top nursing or physical therapy program is the same as doing a two-year associates degree in 'hospital communications.' Once we start seriously splitting hairs--in other words, once we start evaluating courses of study based on the factors that matter most, rather than how closely the names of the courses resemble the names of jobs in general fields of work--it becomes clear that these lists of 'good' and 'evil' majors tell us nothing more than this:
These majors don't sound like any jobs, so these majors are bad for your career.
These majors sound like jobs, so these majors are good for your career.
Beyond the specifics of programs, it's also important to consider quality and reputation of degree, regardless of major. Would Kiplinger by any chance want to compare the unemployment rate of Yale sociology majors to the unemployment rate of entrepreneurial studies majors at Gateway Community College in New Haven? Would Kiplinger dare to compare the average starting and mid-career salaries of 'liberal arts' graduates of colleges like Bucknell, Amherst, or Dartmouth, regularly ranked among the top colleges for graduates' salaries, to for-profit or open-admissions colleges' medical technologies graduates? I'm not suggesting that elite colleges are the only way to go, or even necessarily the best way to go; but judging even the market value of a degree by type of major is even more shallow than judging the value of a degree by institutional prestige. And if we're judging on a shallow basis already by creating a hierarchy of degrees, perhaps Kiplinger should have the courage to fully own the elitism behind its article and note, as any responsible journalistic outlet should, that graduating from Harvard still means more for your pocketbook and your career prospects than graduating with a degree in management information systems.
All of this is of course beside the point, really. The most disgusting thing about this genre of 'worst majors for your career' articles is that they're written by a bunch of narrow-minded, know-nothing business and finance reporters whose job is essentially to tell you that your value system ought to be primarily monetary, and anything else is idealistic or, dismissively, 'a nice sentiment.' For these people, there is no acknowledged, practical middle ground between 'doing what you love' and completely selling out to a mind-numbing job that's clearly in demand because what it demands, in more cases than not, is to be an unthinking body performing a series of alienating tasks for 8-10 hours a day. At the end of the day, you can have a salary of $43,000 instead of $37,000, because you gave up that totally idealistic pursuit of studying something in college that you find interesting. Now, with that extra dough, you can buy things to occupy the rest of the life you've traded for Kiplinger's version of career-minded practicality. Congratulations.
In all seriousness, making a few extra thousand dollars a year is a big deal. It can be the difference between saving for a home, a vacation, a more comfortable retirement, etc., and living check to check. But if we put all of this in perspective--not Kiplinger's warped perspective--even making $32,000 a year is doing pretty well for yourself, better than many of our parents and grandparents ever had it. If you can start out at $32,000 a year as a teacher, a museum curator, a journalist, a theater manager, a graphic designer, an editorial assistant, a grantwriter, an analyst at a nonprofit organization, a community organizer, a social worker, a psychologist, etc., doing something that doesn't make you feel alienated or like you're lending 40-50 hours/week to a cause or purpose in which you feel no stake whatsoever, you're at worst doing pretty damn well for yourself, and at best in the early stages of a truly great career. Maybe as a founder of a highly respected and highly profitable publishing business like, say, Kiplinger.
I feel sad for all the young students and their parents who are consuming these kinds of articles about what college major is best or worst for a career. I feel especially sad for those who will enter a course of study simply because such articles say it's hot, and find that by the time they've graduated the technology has changed or the industry has changed or the economy demands something entirely different. I feel bad for the fact that the United States, whose most far-reaching and lucrative exports are our arts and creativity industries, has begun to lose sight of the bigger picture, to lose sight of the value of not merely creative enterprises themselves, but the relatively expensive time and space it requires to innovate and to achieve great things. I feel bad for the fact that so many of today's college students won't have the opportunity to understand college as perhaps the only time in their lives where they'll be afforded the privilege of learning about something they love, find interesting, find relevant, no matter what job it ostensibly leads or does not lead to. I worry for a country of excellent widget producers, non-thinkers, safe betters. I wonder about those who think that the expert building of scaffolding around substance will somehow come to replace substance itself.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Monday, October 22, 2012
Why I'd Like to Stop Tipping; or, Against Lazy Businesses
One thing about Americans is we tend to confuse generosity and entitlement. Even across the political spectrum, we have a fairly distinct sense of what people should have, but a foggy sense of how people should get it. For example, few would argue that society's poor, indigent, and mentally ill should be left to die in the streets. Some think that we should collect taxes to fund systematic government programs to provide baseline care and sustenance for the poor, while others think that we should rely on the generosity of private individuals and organizations to meet these needs. But in either case, what one group calls a charity and the other an entitlement are both ways of conceiving of the same basic thing as a mixed issue of both.
In some ways this confusion is a positive thing, bespeaking honesty about what I think is a genuine American desire to be helpful and charitable toward the less fortunate. On the other, this confusion is a serious problem that allows us to talk about what people should have but then to choose to do absolutely nothing to provide it.
Perhaps the best example of the kind of confusion of generosity and entitlement that I'm zeroing in on is the American custom of tipping. Though tipping is so commonplace and ingrained in American commerce that we seldom think on a daily basis about why we're doing it, injecting a foreign visitor into the conversation has a way of forcing us to explain and justify the practice, which is considered odd and confusing by most of the wider world. Our responses typically cover two points: 1) tipping is an incentive for better service (and service is generally better, in a loose sense, in America); 2) our service staff are not well compensated for their work in either pay or benefits, and rely on tips in order to earn about minimum wage.
Though I'm inclined to find both of these justifications for tipping to be plausible, I think they constitute a major problem, rather than a distinctly American solution.
Let's consider the first point, service. I am one of those people who regularly says (and means) that I don't pay, or want to pay, for service when I eat at a restaurant. This is to say I don't go to a restaurant to be waited on or to boss people around or to have things brought to me the instant I request them, etc. I go to a restaurant for the food. The service is just a necessary complication of purchasing food in restaurants, a function of the fact that they won't let me pick it up from the kitchen and bring it to my table myself, and a faraway secondary concern (so much so that I often choose takeout places, street carts, and counter service restaurants precisely to avoid the weird and uncomfortable scenario in which someone must bring me the food that I order and tend to me while I'm eating it).
But let's for the sake of argument say that service matters to us, because though I think it's overrated by most Americans, it does truly matter to many. Let's consider that a restaurant is a business. The product that restaurants offer is primarily food, but also service and atmosphere in many cases. This means that restaurants employ both people to prepare the food and people to bring it to us. All of these people, though perhaps working on different components of the product, are under the employ of a single business, the restaurant. The bill we pay at the end of our meal does not get broken down into 'food' versus 'decorator' versus 'service,' no more than when we buy a stapler our receipt says 'alloys,' 'assembly,' and 'marketing.' The point I'm making is that when we eat at restaurants, food is the main draw, but it's also a component of the whole product; which means the cost of service, and all other operating costs of the business, are included in our food bill. We may think of the bill as reflecting a menu price listing for a food item, but those prices are themselves set according to a much more complex formula, which necessarily includes considerations of labor costs, electricity, and other components of overhead balanced against expected revenue and a desired profit margin (to put it crudely).
This leads into the second justification for tipping, which is the low pay of service staff. Let us consider, again, that the responsibility of a business is to pay its labor costs, which in the case of restaurants means paying at least a minimum wage to its service staff. This means that restaurants are being at best disingenuous by advertising a lower food cost, then deferring the remainder of the actual cost of the total product slyly onto the consumer through the expectation of a tip for the service staff; or, at worst restaurants are simply expecting not to have to pay their service employees because customers will be generous enough to pay them instead. Notably, tipping defers the responsibility for getting paid onto the service staff, rather than the employer accepting what should be the employers responsibility to pay their staff).
The obvious question here is a leading one: shouldn't service employees be entitled to pay for their labor? And, as a corollary, shouldn't the employer, not the consumer, be responsible for paying the people it employs?
Quite obviously we would all expect that someone who works a job is entitled to compensation, and that compensating employees is the direct responsibility of the employer. Nevertheless, we've gone so far down the path of confusing generosity with entitlement that for some designated kinds of service, like table waiting, hair cutting, bar tending, cab driving, and the like, we've unthinkingly accepted that it is not the responsibility of the people who own and run these businesses to pay their own employees, but somehow our responsibility as generous, well meaning consumers.
How absurd is this?
In my view, this is just one (albeit extensive) example of what is unmistakably the greatest, most expensive, most pervasive form of entitlement in American society: the entitlement of businesses and corporations. No other segment of society, at either the individual or institutional level, is as entitled and needy and demanding as the business sector. This is so pervasive now that whereas only one political party is likely to advocate for 'entitlement' social programs for the poor or unemployed, both parties in our two-party system regularly step over each other's tongues trying outdo one another over how (small)business friendly they are, how much they'll aim to coddle and hand-hold businesses, how willingly they'll bend over backwards for the sake of businesses, and how dogmatically 'pro-business' they are. Despite how on-the-face-of-it ridiculous is the claim, we've rushed to dub (small)businesses the 'engines of the economy,' and to singularly credit businesses for 'creating jobs.' The idea that any credit for economic growth, including that which is reasonably generated through business, could go to research breakthroughs, educators (for training all those employees), forward-thinking investors in both the government and the private sector, etc., for 'job creation' is anathema in today's climate of coddling and aggrandizing the business sector.
I happen to think that a business can be a great thing when it provides a product or service with honesty and integrity that people honestly want, and when it owns the risks and responsibilities involved in this endeavor. I'd rather pay more for my meal and walk away knowing that tipping isn't expected of me by an entitled business that's deferred its responsibility of compensating its employees onto me, hoping I'll be generous with my own money while forcing its employees to hope the same, or risk not being paid for their work. This is the kind of slippage from a well established definition of a reasonable entitlement (pay for work) into the murky realm of generosity, which is itself a fine thing when it's not exploitatively taken for granted. Sure, when I frequent an establishment and get to know the staff there, I'm inclined to show generosity (in tips) for their willingness to be especially kind and attentive to me; but in every other exchange, why should you or I shoulder this burden? Are we not just feeding irresponsible and lazy business behavior?
In some ways this confusion is a positive thing, bespeaking honesty about what I think is a genuine American desire to be helpful and charitable toward the less fortunate. On the other, this confusion is a serious problem that allows us to talk about what people should have but then to choose to do absolutely nothing to provide it.
Perhaps the best example of the kind of confusion of generosity and entitlement that I'm zeroing in on is the American custom of tipping. Though tipping is so commonplace and ingrained in American commerce that we seldom think on a daily basis about why we're doing it, injecting a foreign visitor into the conversation has a way of forcing us to explain and justify the practice, which is considered odd and confusing by most of the wider world. Our responses typically cover two points: 1) tipping is an incentive for better service (and service is generally better, in a loose sense, in America); 2) our service staff are not well compensated for their work in either pay or benefits, and rely on tips in order to earn about minimum wage.
Though I'm inclined to find both of these justifications for tipping to be plausible, I think they constitute a major problem, rather than a distinctly American solution.
Let's consider the first point, service. I am one of those people who regularly says (and means) that I don't pay, or want to pay, for service when I eat at a restaurant. This is to say I don't go to a restaurant to be waited on or to boss people around or to have things brought to me the instant I request them, etc. I go to a restaurant for the food. The service is just a necessary complication of purchasing food in restaurants, a function of the fact that they won't let me pick it up from the kitchen and bring it to my table myself, and a faraway secondary concern (so much so that I often choose takeout places, street carts, and counter service restaurants precisely to avoid the weird and uncomfortable scenario in which someone must bring me the food that I order and tend to me while I'm eating it).
But let's for the sake of argument say that service matters to us, because though I think it's overrated by most Americans, it does truly matter to many. Let's consider that a restaurant is a business. The product that restaurants offer is primarily food, but also service and atmosphere in many cases. This means that restaurants employ both people to prepare the food and people to bring it to us. All of these people, though perhaps working on different components of the product, are under the employ of a single business, the restaurant. The bill we pay at the end of our meal does not get broken down into 'food' versus 'decorator' versus 'service,' no more than when we buy a stapler our receipt says 'alloys,' 'assembly,' and 'marketing.' The point I'm making is that when we eat at restaurants, food is the main draw, but it's also a component of the whole product; which means the cost of service, and all other operating costs of the business, are included in our food bill. We may think of the bill as reflecting a menu price listing for a food item, but those prices are themselves set according to a much more complex formula, which necessarily includes considerations of labor costs, electricity, and other components of overhead balanced against expected revenue and a desired profit margin (to put it crudely).
This leads into the second justification for tipping, which is the low pay of service staff. Let us consider, again, that the responsibility of a business is to pay its labor costs, which in the case of restaurants means paying at least a minimum wage to its service staff. This means that restaurants are being at best disingenuous by advertising a lower food cost, then deferring the remainder of the actual cost of the total product slyly onto the consumer through the expectation of a tip for the service staff; or, at worst restaurants are simply expecting not to have to pay their service employees because customers will be generous enough to pay them instead. Notably, tipping defers the responsibility for getting paid onto the service staff, rather than the employer accepting what should be the employers responsibility to pay their staff).
The obvious question here is a leading one: shouldn't service employees be entitled to pay for their labor? And, as a corollary, shouldn't the employer, not the consumer, be responsible for paying the people it employs?
Quite obviously we would all expect that someone who works a job is entitled to compensation, and that compensating employees is the direct responsibility of the employer. Nevertheless, we've gone so far down the path of confusing generosity with entitlement that for some designated kinds of service, like table waiting, hair cutting, bar tending, cab driving, and the like, we've unthinkingly accepted that it is not the responsibility of the people who own and run these businesses to pay their own employees, but somehow our responsibility as generous, well meaning consumers.
How absurd is this?
In my view, this is just one (albeit extensive) example of what is unmistakably the greatest, most expensive, most pervasive form of entitlement in American society: the entitlement of businesses and corporations. No other segment of society, at either the individual or institutional level, is as entitled and needy and demanding as the business sector. This is so pervasive now that whereas only one political party is likely to advocate for 'entitlement' social programs for the poor or unemployed, both parties in our two-party system regularly step over each other's tongues trying outdo one another over how (small)business friendly they are, how much they'll aim to coddle and hand-hold businesses, how willingly they'll bend over backwards for the sake of businesses, and how dogmatically 'pro-business' they are. Despite how on-the-face-of-it ridiculous is the claim, we've rushed to dub (small)businesses the 'engines of the economy,' and to singularly credit businesses for 'creating jobs.' The idea that any credit for economic growth, including that which is reasonably generated through business, could go to research breakthroughs, educators (for training all those employees), forward-thinking investors in both the government and the private sector, etc., for 'job creation' is anathema in today's climate of coddling and aggrandizing the business sector.
I happen to think that a business can be a great thing when it provides a product or service with honesty and integrity that people honestly want, and when it owns the risks and responsibilities involved in this endeavor. I'd rather pay more for my meal and walk away knowing that tipping isn't expected of me by an entitled business that's deferred its responsibility of compensating its employees onto me, hoping I'll be generous with my own money while forcing its employees to hope the same, or risk not being paid for their work. This is the kind of slippage from a well established definition of a reasonable entitlement (pay for work) into the murky realm of generosity, which is itself a fine thing when it's not exploitatively taken for granted. Sure, when I frequent an establishment and get to know the staff there, I'm inclined to show generosity (in tips) for their willingness to be especially kind and attentive to me; but in every other exchange, why should you or I shoulder this burden? Are we not just feeding irresponsible and lazy business behavior?
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Parents, Babies, and Facebook Oversharing
I'll begin this post with an issue that regularly gets lost in discussions about Facebook, Pinterest, and other social media 'oversharing' of photos and information about young children by their parents: I still care a lot about my own privacy.
Even as an educated and fully functioning (no wise remarks!) adult in charge of my own choices to post photos or information about myself online, I try to be guarded and conscientious about what aspects of what I define as my personal life I share online for public consumption. For example, whereas I used to be OK having lots of photos of myself on Facebook, I have since come to the realization that I don't like the idea of others having or using photos of me without my control or consent. Related considerations are, for example: will people download and alter photos of me for their own purposes or to manipulate my (however confined) public image? Will these photos be archived in servers whose content and security are beyond my control, and could end up in the hands of people doing things with such information that I wouldn't condone? To what extent are my photos and data already 'out there' being used for marketing at no cost to marketers? To what extent are companies able to use my photos and data to approximate my consumer preferences or lifestyle choices?
You might think some of this sounds like paranoia, given the extent to which privacy has been eroded in the 'online' era, and oversharing is routine (and here I'm thinking less about what we typically conceive of as traditional privacy infringements, like re. medical records or household affairs, and more about more subtle tracking of our quotidian interests and consumption habits via data mining). But just because we have lower standards of privacy today than perhaps we once did before we all acquired a global audience by virtue of acquiring a cell phone with a data plan, doesn't mean there aren't real privacy issues still in play, even for those of us who choose what to post and what to withhold.
I'm increasingly troubled, for example, by the fact that the consumer is now more or less expected to give away valuable personal data and marketing information for free, not through the conscious signing of a contract, but passively, through the ever-changing and labyrinthine 'privacy' policies of online and social media tools whose very livelihoods depend largely on user-generated value from user-generated information. I wonder if users, disparate and disconnected, are getting a good deal in this marketplace by paying nothing to use Facebook, but at the same time handing over our most valuable commodity to Facebook for free. You might think free is free, until you consider that the resale value of a free 2012 BMW is higher than the value of a free pencil.
This is admittedly an unsophisticated discussion of internet privacy, but it's meant merely to frame what I want to say about parents oversharing baby photos and information. It happens that, for my own selfish reasons, I'm one of those horrible people who thinks your kids are less cute and less interesting than you think your own kids are. I happen to think when they shit and vomit it's less of an event in my day than it is in yours. And the gap in appreciation there is something I'm comfortable stating, even if it offends you to know that I don't love your children as much as you love your children, because they're not my children.
But I understand that you're not posting things about your kids for me. You're posting for you. And that's your right. It's your right so much so that when posting for you, I don't think you should have to think about me or my preferences. Your posts, your kids, your life to share. I get that.
I'm only inclined to offer my opinion about your posts when I think (as is my right, my preference) that what you're doing is insensitive and maybe even potentially harmful to your children, not to me. I'm not writing this to moan and gripe about how I'm slightly and unremarkably annoyed by your baby vomit and nosebleed photos. I understand that I could de-friend or filter my Facebook feed to block them out if I were oh so bothered by them. This really is not about me or my personal preferences with respect to you, and that's the first thing here that you need to understand.
I'm concerned about two related aspects of parental oversharing in the abstract, whether I see this content or not:
First, your children aren't old enough to consent to having their childhood documented on Facebook and Pinterest for all the world to see. Second, by putting their images and information out there without filter and without their consent, you're potentially exposing them and their images to creeps, crazies, and pedophiles, to unscrupulous marketing companies and data miners, and to an archive whose further use and exposure we cannot presently know (remember, just as I can filter my news feed, you can choose to only send baby photos and updates to family and close friends; so don't think I'm suggesting either that the people in your life who matter to you shouldn't care about your life or your kids).
When grumps like me bring this up--this broader issue for the future of privacy and children's privacy, which I would think parents would want to consider, even if they disagree with me--the responses are always the same:
"You can block me from your Facebook feed."
"I love my children; deal with it!"
"If you hate it so much, that's your problem/fuck off/you're mean."
"A (parent) should/has every right to show their love for their children."
"You don't have children, you don't understand how much they mean to me."
These are inevitably fortified with cheers and laudatory remarks like:
"Fuck that guy, you go momma!"
"It's no one's business but your own that you love your children so much" (ironically)
"I love your children too!"
"Your children are beautiful/an inspiration/wonderful/adorable/superlative!"
Frankly, most of this is great on its own. There's nothing wrong with being proud of your children and loving them so much that you can't describe it, that you want to share your pride and love for them, that they are the center of your world. This is perhaps as it should be, or as it always will be, between parents and their young children. It's just that this is all beside the point that when you share photos and information about your children online and with little or no filter for whom you're sharing it with, there's still a legitimate question of whether this is in your child's best interest. Making me the asshole may deflect this point, but it certainly doesn't address it, nor change the reality about which it's meant to raise caution.
In the end, it's certainly your decision. It's not my role to tell anyone how to parent their children, or what to share or not to share. But as someone who is getting to that age where we start thinking about children of our own--no light decision--I do have my own opinions and concerns.
Even as an educated and fully functioning (no wise remarks!) adult in charge of my own choices to post photos or information about myself online, I try to be guarded and conscientious about what aspects of what I define as my personal life I share online for public consumption. For example, whereas I used to be OK having lots of photos of myself on Facebook, I have since come to the realization that I don't like the idea of others having or using photos of me without my control or consent. Related considerations are, for example: will people download and alter photos of me for their own purposes or to manipulate my (however confined) public image? Will these photos be archived in servers whose content and security are beyond my control, and could end up in the hands of people doing things with such information that I wouldn't condone? To what extent are my photos and data already 'out there' being used for marketing at no cost to marketers? To what extent are companies able to use my photos and data to approximate my consumer preferences or lifestyle choices?
You might think some of this sounds like paranoia, given the extent to which privacy has been eroded in the 'online' era, and oversharing is routine (and here I'm thinking less about what we typically conceive of as traditional privacy infringements, like re. medical records or household affairs, and more about more subtle tracking of our quotidian interests and consumption habits via data mining). But just because we have lower standards of privacy today than perhaps we once did before we all acquired a global audience by virtue of acquiring a cell phone with a data plan, doesn't mean there aren't real privacy issues still in play, even for those of us who choose what to post and what to withhold.
I'm increasingly troubled, for example, by the fact that the consumer is now more or less expected to give away valuable personal data and marketing information for free, not through the conscious signing of a contract, but passively, through the ever-changing and labyrinthine 'privacy' policies of online and social media tools whose very livelihoods depend largely on user-generated value from user-generated information. I wonder if users, disparate and disconnected, are getting a good deal in this marketplace by paying nothing to use Facebook, but at the same time handing over our most valuable commodity to Facebook for free. You might think free is free, until you consider that the resale value of a free 2012 BMW is higher than the value of a free pencil.
This is admittedly an unsophisticated discussion of internet privacy, but it's meant merely to frame what I want to say about parents oversharing baby photos and information. It happens that, for my own selfish reasons, I'm one of those horrible people who thinks your kids are less cute and less interesting than you think your own kids are. I happen to think when they shit and vomit it's less of an event in my day than it is in yours. And the gap in appreciation there is something I'm comfortable stating, even if it offends you to know that I don't love your children as much as you love your children, because they're not my children.
But I understand that you're not posting things about your kids for me. You're posting for you. And that's your right. It's your right so much so that when posting for you, I don't think you should have to think about me or my preferences. Your posts, your kids, your life to share. I get that.
I'm only inclined to offer my opinion about your posts when I think (as is my right, my preference) that what you're doing is insensitive and maybe even potentially harmful to your children, not to me. I'm not writing this to moan and gripe about how I'm slightly and unremarkably annoyed by your baby vomit and nosebleed photos. I understand that I could de-friend or filter my Facebook feed to block them out if I were oh so bothered by them. This really is not about me or my personal preferences with respect to you, and that's the first thing here that you need to understand.
I'm concerned about two related aspects of parental oversharing in the abstract, whether I see this content or not:
First, your children aren't old enough to consent to having their childhood documented on Facebook and Pinterest for all the world to see. Second, by putting their images and information out there without filter and without their consent, you're potentially exposing them and their images to creeps, crazies, and pedophiles, to unscrupulous marketing companies and data miners, and to an archive whose further use and exposure we cannot presently know (remember, just as I can filter my news feed, you can choose to only send baby photos and updates to family and close friends; so don't think I'm suggesting either that the people in your life who matter to you shouldn't care about your life or your kids).
When grumps like me bring this up--this broader issue for the future of privacy and children's privacy, which I would think parents would want to consider, even if they disagree with me--the responses are always the same:
"You can block me from your Facebook feed."
"I love my children; deal with it!"
"If you hate it so much, that's your problem/fuck off/you're mean."
"A (parent) should/has every right to show their love for their children."
"You don't have children, you don't understand how much they mean to me."
These are inevitably fortified with cheers and laudatory remarks like:
"Fuck that guy, you go momma!"
"It's no one's business but your own that you love your children so much" (ironically)
"I love your children too!"
"Your children are beautiful/an inspiration/wonderful/adorable/superlative!"
Frankly, most of this is great on its own. There's nothing wrong with being proud of your children and loving them so much that you can't describe it, that you want to share your pride and love for them, that they are the center of your world. This is perhaps as it should be, or as it always will be, between parents and their young children. It's just that this is all beside the point that when you share photos and information about your children online and with little or no filter for whom you're sharing it with, there's still a legitimate question of whether this is in your child's best interest. Making me the asshole may deflect this point, but it certainly doesn't address it, nor change the reality about which it's meant to raise caution.
In the end, it's certainly your decision. It's not my role to tell anyone how to parent their children, or what to share or not to share. But as someone who is getting to that age where we start thinking about children of our own--no light decision--I do have my own opinions and concerns.
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