Starting from the womb

Some days, like today, because I am not getting any damn email, I gad through the "next blog" link on the upper righthand corner of the page to see what I can stumble across. The most surprising thing from this meandering through blogspot has been the excessive amount of baby blogs. Many parents are choosing to blog from a child's inception. Here's one example, that starts in the womb, but really there has to be a ton based on how many I've seen without looking for them. I came across one blog that was supposedly written by the baby... unfortunately, that was so saccharine that if I tried to link to it, it would melt.

This is- I guess- cute in a way, but basically it is a strange trend. I mean, parents can keep far-flung friends and relatives in the loop, and broadcast their love for the child. But from the kid's perspective- I would imagine it would be fun to see baby pictures of yourself and all that, and it's nice to know your parents care a lot about your infantile self, but this particular blogging phenomenon brings it to a weird microlevel that mentions every little stage of development. What happens when your parents have set up a blog for you from day one and then you get to middle school and your crush googles you? It's kind of awkward that they could read about your first burp, hear a podcast of you mispronouncing a word, and see pictures from your first bath.

One post I read on Red Herring, by a blogging parent, had this to say on it:

My efforts to archive my children's lives stand in stark contrast to the scant documentation of my own past. My entire childhood is preserved in just under 200 pictures, a few letters, and a couple of yearbooks: it all fits in a single box. In contrast, I can take 200 pictures of my daughter at a birthday party. At my current rate, each of my children is in danger of having me take 50,000 pictures of them by the time they turn 18. It used to be that only presidents and Nobel laureates had such thoroughly documented lives. Thanks to digital technology, the archive – once a symbol of political power, fame, or wealth – is being democratized.

Is this a good thing? Is the idea that someday the child will take over this blog? Who would want that much of their self on the internet? I mean part of the fun of the internet is the idea that you can reinvent yourself ("on the internet, no one knows you are a dog")-- but that is not an easy thing to do if you have existed on the web before you were cognizant of existence itself.

Anyway, as it turns out, pets can have their own blogs too.