Fetal Facebook pages
Facebook status update: "I am kicking."
How young is too young to have a Facebook page? According to Facebook’s Terms of Service, one must be age 13 or older. But quite a few parents want to get their kids social network savvy right away. Like while they’re still in the womb.
Purely anecdotally, friends slightly older than me — those in their 30s — report that they’re starting to getting Facebook add requests from their friends’ fetuses. Status update: “I am kicking”?
Ubergizmo comes to my rescue to back up the anecdote:
Orange research claims that 21% of parents have already set up a social networking profile for their baby – that roughly equals to 57,000 babies with their very own Facebook, MySpace or Bebo profile in the UK alone.
via social network profile for babies – Unborn Have Their Own Social Networking Page.
That’s a post from last year, so who knows how many babies are online now.
In 2007, an Australian couple was one of the first to put their fetus, Bubba Waring, on Facebook. They got lots of news coverage at the time, but apparently, despite its T.O.S., Facebook let the underage Bubba stay online. A note from Bubba on September 3, 2007, at 31 weeks:
I spend most of my time upside down so I can kick mum in the ribs and I have a chillaxed heart rate of 129 bpm.
The idea of having your whole life played out on Facebook strikes me as a little bit creepy. Being the voyeur that I am, I friended Bubs — a more mature name for the now mature toddler — back in March… and the one-year-old accepted.
Rather than one day inviting friends over to his house to look at old photo albums to relive his past, Bubs will just be able to tell them to explore his Facebook page.
Bubs currently has fewer than 100 friends on Facebook. I feel honored to be among them, but am surprised that (1) the 1-year-old Bubs already has 95 friends and (2) that he (or more likely, his mom) accepted a friend request from a random 20-something American woman. I can now see photos, status updates, and even his phone number. It’s like being invited into the family’s virtual living room.
Bubs is adorable by the way. Bubbles make him laugh.
I wonder how Bubs feels about having a page that dates back to his fetal days. Maybe I’ll check in with him in a few years, when he might actually have an opinion about it. Like in 2012, when he’s five.
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I’m 25 and I would say that about 90% of my friends are on Facebook. It’s fascinating that we’re coming up on a new generation of people who will have their whole lives recorded online, from their friendships, their likes, and dislikes, and if they do location based social networking, everywhere they’ve been will be online as a record of who they were and what they were doing. In Twitter’s case, or whatever other lifestreaming/microblogging platform comes around, peoples’ random thoughts will be able to be chronologically sorted for years and years.
Kind of scary. Kind of cool.
Lately, your posts have made me want to get off online completely, Kashmir. Gimme some good news or I’l have to utterly unplug from social networking!
Right after I fill out this zygote’s “about me” page…
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