The Digital Lives of Babies - Cultural Studies
NY Times Feb. 20, 2011 MY wife was about to go into the operating room for a scheduled C-section a few months ago when a nurse asked me an urgent question: Where is your camera? I was waiting anxiously in the hospitals prep area, in surgical scrubs, cap, mask and slippers, prepared to witness the birth of our second child. Is it time to go in yet? I asked, somewhat dazed. The nurse stared at me in disbelief. Dont you want to take pictures? Suddenly I felt ashamed, as if I were back in the fourth grade and dressed in straight-leg pants when everyone else was wearing bell bottoms. I dont know where the camera is, I said. The nurses eyes widened in something like alarm. I think she had it, I blurted out nervously, referring to my wife, who was lying on the operating table, the anesthetic making its way up her spinal cord and through her nervous system. Ill be right back, the nurse said. She returned in a few minutes and said triumphantly: She says its at the bottom of her bag. I retrieved the camera and began fumbling with it. I dont think I know how to work this, I confessed. Can we go in now? The nurse shook her head and extracted the camera from my trembling hands. Ill take the pictures for you, she said. She took a few steps back. Smile, she commanded, and snapped away. You look like a doctor! she said. >From that moment on, she was in control. In the operating room, from my perch by my wifes head, I could see the cameras flash from the other side of curtain and hear the nurse-photographers commentary: Nice! Oh, that is going to be a good one. Hold her up. There! Im otherwise grateful to that nurse who, despite her self-appointed documentarian duties, helped bring our baby girl into the world with care and expertise. But I still marvel at the presumed necessity of the camera, for all its ubiquitousness, in the birthing chamber. The idea that anything, or a small anyone, might deserve protection from the digital lens has become an aberration. I assume I was expected to rush off and upload my daughters arrival on YouTube before shed even had her first diaper change at home. It was once understood that your own most-intimate photographs of your children, or the movies that you made of them, would be shown to other family members and to (bored) friends. You called the latter home movies because you made them at home, and showed them at home. Now, more and more parent-photographers have attained the global reach of Sony Pictures, marketing their domestic wares worldwide. The spontaneity and casualness of snapping family pictures has given way to the calculated, self-conscious display of family members, usually children. A recent study <http://jrsmith.blog.avg.com/2010/10/would-you-want-a-digital-footprint-from -birth.html> published by AVG, an Internet security company, found that 92 percent of American children have an online presence by the time they are 2. One third of mothers in the United States said that they had posted pictures of their newborns online, and 34 percent of American mothers had posted sonograms of their babies in the womb. According to the AVG study, American mothers are more likely to post pictures of their children online than mothers in any other country. The AVG study refers to the first appearance of children on the Internet as their digital birth. That seems apt. From that point on, these children will have two lives: one presumably lived consciously and deliberately; and the other, digitized life, subject to countless unknown pairs of eyes, as well as to countless unknown uses and purposes. And this raises the question of free choice. Unlike adults who post pictures of themselves on social networking sites, these babies and children have their images broadcast around the world not against their will, per se, but before they have any will to speak of at all. We cringe at video of an animal being mocked in a moment of indignity, but the Internet bulges with videos of babies and children captured ignominiously like so many dancing bears for our supposed amusement. Consider Baby Dancing to Beyoncé <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikTxfIDYx6Q> , which went viral on Yahoo video a couple of years ago. Cory was 13 months old when we caught him dancing in his grandmothers lounge to Beyoncés video Single Ladies, boasts the accompanying caption. You see Cory from behind, clad in a diaper with his hands on a coffee table, bobbing up and down and swaying from side to side as Beyoncé Knowles and two other female dancers provocatively prance around in skimpy leotards on a giant screen before him. Happy Digital Birthday, kid. In the YouTube hit, David After Dentist <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txqiwrbYGrs> , a 7-year-old boy sits, apparently drugged, in the back seat of a car, speaking confusedly as his father prods him with questions; Dad: You feel good? David: I cant see anything. Dad: Yes you can. Cory has had more than 1 million pairs of eyes watching him. Nearly 82 million have gazed at David. There are certainly precedents to these displays. In 1992, people worried that the photographer Sally Mann <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/sally_mann/ind ex.html?inline=nyt-per> s portraits of her naked children amounted to child pornography; 12 years earlier, ads showing a 15-year-old Brooke Shields <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/brooke_shields /index.html?inline=nyt-per> packed into a pair of Calvin Klein jeans provoked the same concern. It is always morally problematic when societys most vulnerable members, children, have their images taken from them without being able to refuse or consent. Susan Sontag <http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/onPhotographyExerpt.shtml> once wrote that there is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. Photography, she said, was a tool of power. Snapping barely sentient children uncomfortably brings to mind acts of abduction and enslavement, or the villainous impresario Stromboli, who forces Pinocchio to be a money-making puppet when all he wants is to be an innocent boy. Parents broadcasting of their childrens images to the Webs vast audience seems to occupy its own category of moral unease. It is too unconsidered, for all its ambitious expressiveness, to remotely resemble Ms. Manns photos, which were, after all, subtle, complex works of art. And unlike the young Ms. Shields (who appeared in an ad for Ivory Snow when she was 11 months old), the unwitting subjects of Baby Dancing and David are not sequestered by an exclusive professional context. The Calvin Klein ads made people anxious about the atmosphere Ms. Shieldss image was creating, not about Ms. Shields herself. The proliferation of adorable babies and children on the Web makes you wonder, above all, how these children are being perceived by the parents who snap their images, not to mention how they are learning to see themselves. Id rather be smart than be an actor, Pinocchio tells Jiminy Cricket in the Disney film, after he escapes from Strombolis circus. In the infinitely expansive world of Web diversion, it seems as if babies and children exist only as actors. And what they perform is often some impersonation of adulthood. It is as if the idea of innocence has become so alien to us that we must use the camera to transform children into reassuring reflections of our adult selves, and of our highest adult priorities. In one of its most popular commercials, E*Trade <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/etrade_financial_corp oration/index.html?inline=nyt-org> has its trademark baby, speaking in an adult voice, saying: I just bought stock. You just saw me buy stock. It makes you want to hang your viewfinder in shame. Lee Siegel is the author of Against the Machine: How the Web Is Reshaping Culture and Commerce and Why It Matters NY Times Feb. 20, 2011.
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