Babies and children influencers on the networks: is it okay?

Sometimes the stories Hollywood tells on screen They pale in comparison to those experienced within film studios.

The lives of celebrities like Drew Barrymore, Brooke Shields, Macaulay Culkin and other child prodigies show the problems of growing up in the public eye and with families that appropriate the fortune they generate.

This pernicious paradigm seems to have been updated and perfected with the boom in baby and infant accounts on networks like Instagramwhich generate large amounts of money by marketing the private lives of minors who do not have the ability to decide if they want to be exposed to millions of people.

For some families, their children have become, even before they are born, true business units, with an oiled system to convert likes into money and the interactions they achieve.

Without legislation to regulate this activity, technically the parents keep that income while the little ones are the ones who should poseattend events and even be dressed in certain clothes.

But the problem is not only monetary, but the web – in addition to enable new types of crimesviolence and abuse – annulled the possibility of forgetting.

Once someone shares an image, it’s impossible to know who else has it, where it was posted, what public cloud is it on or at whose disposal.

Let us think, for example, of memes that involve minors and that have fallsembarrassing questions or even nudity.

Going through painful or humiliating moments should not be a reason for shame: all people have traumatic events that, when we manage to overcome them, they open us up and facilitate the transition to the future.

These experiences seem to be an integral part of our growth and allow us to reach maturity.

But they also play a central role the memories of those moments along with the forgetfulness: our lives would be very hard carrying the weight of everything we experienced.

Until now we only remembered certain moments when we reviewed old albums or we found a yellowish photo.

Now Those images are on social networks, servers and hard drives interconnected without our complete control.

Thus, not only do we experience the transformation of private memories that are now shared, but it is almost impossible to break the link with the past, since our images and in some sense our memories, our relationships and our desires increasingly belong to others and less to us.

This means that the ability to leave childhood and adolescence behind, and the likelihood that others will forget our pastis also in danger.

For the American communication theorist Neil Postman, childhood, a relatively recent concept, is a construction that has always been linked to the history of media technologies and today it is completely crossed by digital.

It may be early to define this impact in the future, but we shouldn’t be surprised if soon the first babies and children influencers turn to Justice to claim for their violated rights.