Recently, writer Steven Leckart coined the term “oversharenting” to refer to the omnificent practice of Gen-C (as in connected adults ages 18 to 34, per Nielsen) parents who overpost photos of their young children in curious circumstances.
He wrote in The Wall Street Journal:
Although privacy settings allow us to control which circle of friends has access to parts of our profiles, many people either don’t understand how to use them or prefer not to.
So there’s a wave of sentiment now about parents asking “When is too much, too much?”. The idea that you may be overstepping your boundaries when it comes to posting pictures of your kids without their consent is creeping into the Great Parenting Debate. Sure babies are always cute and adorable to look at. Why wouldn’t you want to share them with your friends? But the excessive picture posting may feel like too much, for some people.
The ease of social media’s sharing functionality erases the usual waiting period between the time one usually waits to think if it’s appropriate to share or not to share. Case in point: do you want to share potty training pictures with the world? How will that come back to bite your child when they apply for a job in twenty years and the recruiting person sees that photo?
A lot of parents don’t tend to think that one day the adorable child will grow up and may want to delete some photos of their childhood for whatever reasons they may have. Taking that choice away from them until they’re old enough to complain is a question each parent with a social media profile needs to address now.
Likewise, friends of parents also need to be informed about their preferences when posting pictures of the child online. How much information is permissible? What’s the best way to make that request firmly and yet tactfully at the same time? Sounds like a Dear Abby situation to me (if it hasn’t already been written in).
Source: http://createasocialbuzz.com/wp-admin/post-new.php
June 1, 2012
Create A Social Buzz