Whispering sweet nothings into the internet's ear since May of 2002.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been basically live-blogging my son Jackson’s life since he arrived 17 days ago. I don’t plan on stopping this at all. I’ve set up a Jackson, Year 1 photoset on Flickr (added as a slideshow below; where I’m collecting all his daily pictures), and I’m sure there will be a year two, year three, etc as well. I’ve had some people unfollow me on Twitter, but I’ve also had people tell me that they look forward to my Jackson related items and even without them both Kristin and my extended family have been very grateful that we’re streaming what’s going on since many of them haven’t seen him in person yet (and may not for some time).

And I’ve also been uploading videos like this one on YouTube:

Of course, none of this would have been feasible very long ago. There’s been a collision of technologies that make live-blogging the life of your new child something that is not only doable, but easily doable, and 3 main things that make this easy to do:

1. Twitter and being able to type in a message of what’s going on with one hand while holding the baby in my other hand and have that message go to Twitter, then the appear in the sidebar of this site, and as my Facebook status update.
2. The ability to take a decent quality picture with my cellphone and email that to a special Flickr address that both uploads the image to Flickr and posts a link to the image in my Twitter stream, which in turn gets broadcast both to the sidebar of my blog where all the grandparents and great-grandparents are looking daily and to my FriendFeed stream, which in turn broadcasts into my Facebook account where many of my distributed friends get to look and comment.
3. The ability to shoot a quick video with my phone and upload that directly to YouTube.

All of these things are dependent upon wireless connectivity (whether it be WiFi or a 3G connection) and connectivity that is fast enough to make these things possible. I’m pretty amazed at how easy all this is compared to even a few years ago.

Now, some people will get philosophical on me and tell me that I shouldn’t be sharing this much of my infant’s life, not because it clutters up the stream in any way, but because it’s an infringement on his privacy. I have several answers to that.

First, privacy is largely a construct. I would even go so far as to say that the version of privacy that most of us are familiar with is a construct of the bourgeoisie. If you look at tribal cultures, there is little that is private and most things are shared with the entire tribe. Growing up in gossipping Mississippi, I was very aware of how aware everyone else was of my life. Not only is privacy largely a construct, but it is one which is failing and which will most likely be entirely gone in the big brother future in which my son will live. I don’t say this gladly, but looking at how things are going right now, I say it realistically. None of this is to say that I don’t believe in privacy. It’s just that my definition of it is most likely much different than the current socially accepted norm (as is my definition of Christianity and multiple other topics where most people, in my opinion, cloud their current experiences and culture into their understanding and practice of the culture of whatever it is that they think they believe in).

Secondly, and most importantly, the members of MY tribe (my parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends down South, as well as many of my close friends in London, Illinois, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, Tennessee, and Germany, and of course all the people who I have known virtually online for years and who generally wish me and mine well) not only want, but need to see my son and see that he is okay and doing well and that his mother and father are dealing with the incredible burden of being new parents and that everything is going to be okay.

And lastly, I’ve always been someone who overshares, as anyone who reads this blog or follows me on Twitter knows. And as anyone who knows me in real life also knows, I’m capable of being very discrete about what I share openly here and what I share with just close friends and I am extremely talented at keeping secrets. Do you really think with a loving, over-sharing father like me, my son is going to be very concerned at all with all this info being shared about him when he grows older? Do you really think that he won’t be as self-assured, confident, and (unfortunately) bull-headed as I am after soaking in my love for years and years?

He’s going to be amazing. Don’t believe me? Stay tuned and you’ll see.

Tagged as: baby, children, liveblogging, privacy, technology

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