300 Reviews

#86 – Facebooks Commandeered by Infants

May 2nd, 2011 by 300 Reviews

Much has been made of the creeping conquest of Facebook™ by grandmothers and in-laws. But more troublesome than the intrusive older relatives is the proliferation of babies with their own pages and profiles. An initial glance at my feed and I’m impressed. I think, Here is an inordinately tech-savvy three-month old.

But the truth is much too ordinary. Another poor soul has changed her profile picture to some little stinker, manically tagging her post-partum woes away. The transition is remarkable: an internet presence once so self-consciously millennial turned unabashed and … slobbery. It used to be that one only suffered through naked baby albums when one was fool enough to bring a date home to Mom. No longer.

My baby-weariness is solely a cyber phenomenon. In real life, I find them terse but otherwise tolerable. But internet baby-related offenses grow exponentially as I get older. Take the Facebook™ of a girl I knew in high school. At fifteen we kissed and climbed fences to go skinny-dipping in locked pools. It was a weird little crush. Inevitably we fell out of touch. However, when news reached me that she was pregnant, I took to cyberspying on this long lost never-love. All my memories rewrote themselves so that she swelled up: a moon-bellied thing in black water, in math class, in the yard of her mobile home.

When the big day came, she posted a picture of her newborn son straight out the conch. I stared in mute horror at the slimy purple personling. Here was a child crying its first cry, held aloft by nurses, the strange cord clipped—and already it was living a second life. A virtual one. Yes, Creation, bloody and brutish, now comes with a like and unlike button! As if any of us had a say.

-A.G. Moore

Tags: Amanda, babies, cyber phenomenons, cyberspying, facebook, internet presence, post-partum woes, second life, tech-savvy