A book newly acquired by the Thammasat University Library should be useful to students who are interested in media studies, education, law, communications, sociology, and related subjects.

Sharenthood: Why We Should Think before We Talk about Our Kids Online is shelved in the General Stacks of the Puey Ungphakorn Library, Rangsit campus.

The TU library also owns several books on the related topic of cyberbullying. 

The author, Leah A. Plunkett, titled her book by combining the words parenthood and sharing. Many parents around the world, including in Thailand, share lots of information about their children online, through Facebook and other social media.

Professor Plunkett is associate dean for administration, associate professor of legal skills, director of academic success, University of New Hampshire School of Law and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

She earned a bachelor of arts degree in American history and literature from Harvard College, and a doctorate of law from Harvard Law School, where she was training director for the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.

Professor Plunkett’s book is summarized as follows:

From baby pictures in the cloud to a high school’s digital surveillance system: how adults unwittingly compromise children’s privacy online. Our children’s first digital footprints are made before they can walk–even before they are born–as parents use fertility apps to aid conception, post ultrasound images, and share their baby’s hospital mug shot. Then, in rapid succession come terabytes of baby pictures stored in the cloud, digital baby monitors with built-in artificial intelligence, and real-time updates from daycare. When school starts, there are cafeteria cards that catalog food purchases, bus passes that track when kids are on and off the bus, electronic health records in the nurse’s office, and a school surveillance system that has eyes everywhere. Unwittingly, parents, teachers, and other trusted adults are compiling digital dossiers for children that could be available to everyone–friends, employers, law enforcement–forever. In this incisive book, Leah Plunkett examines the implications of “sharenthood”–adults’ excessive digital sharing of children’s data. She outlines the mistakes adults make with kids’ private information, the risks that result, and the legal system that enables “sharenting.” Plunkett describes various modes of sharenting–including “commercial sharenting,” efforts by parents to use their families’ private experiences to make money–and unpacks the faulty assumptions made by our legal system about children, parents, and privacy. She proposes a “thought compass” to guide adults in their decision making about children’s digital data: play, forget, connect, and respect. Enshrining every false step and bad choice, Plunkett argues, can rob children of their chance to explore and learn lessons. The Internet needs to forget. We need to remember.

In an interview, Professor Plunkett suggested:

I think we are fundamentally eroding the nature of childhood by exposing our kids to this near-constant surveillance, whether it’s Alexa or Fitbit or facial recognition or education technology. … The sum total effect is we are removing the archetype of Tom Sawyer, the ability to make mistakes and grow up better for having made them… The term ‘sharenting’ – I think it’s being used too often in too limited a way. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, what parents do on social media. And that kind of discussion may hide the global problem we have. Having the A.I. assistant, smart home, tracking or surveillance device actively or passively picking up family data, including kids data. … And that data is out there, with data brokers and other commercial providers trading it, largely unregulated. There is a gold rush for data in the private sector, but we have very little ability to get transparency about how it’s being collected and being used.

She values a sense of privacy and protected space for children playing, rather than photographing or filming almost everything they do:

Children learn what they live. If they see us taking pictures of them constantly and putting them online, or they’re aware there’s always a camera pointing at them, they may not ask questions of their friends, or a government actor, doing the same thing. We want kids who are going to ask questions down the road.

Sharenthood specifically objects to some images that parents put online to show how funny their children are:

Kids are natural comedic geniuses. Toddlers find it hilarious to repeat the old “throw the spoon on the floor, shriek for dad to pick it up, repeat” routine. Parents are also funny: they can make the spoon start to talk, flirt with the fork, and elope with the dish. Mazel tov! Maybe the family is the only one laughing, but it’s a spoonful of sugar to help real life go down. The sweetness starts to sour, though, when we get laughs at our kids’ expense rather than laughing with them or at ourselves. Take the annual trick or treat prank that late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel sets up every year.

Parents pretend they have finished all of their children’s Halloween candy, film their children’s response, and share the recordings digitally. The YouTube video of the 2017 “I told my kids I ate all their Halloween candy” challenge put out by the Jimmy Kimmel show has more than 2.8 million views. Kimmel gets contributions from sharenters everywhere. Spoiler alert: taking candy from a baby may be easy for the adults, but there’s nothing easy about it for the babies. These kids take it hard. Some of them have epic flipouts, and others struggle to remain calm while falling apart inside. The trick cuts deep, upending the immediate promise of Halloween mirth and the fundamental one of parental reliability. It generates a cheap and even sadistic laugh. That so many parents play along raises a disturbing question about the adult appetite for humor: how much of it is based on behavior that should be understood as bullying? It’s a loaded word, but cyberbullying might be the right term to describe the dynamics underlying certain instances of commercial and noncommercial sharenting.

In the last decade or so, there has been a growing focus by educators, lawmakers, and other decision makers on how to address bullying behaviors between youth, as well as to protect kids and teens from the harms that result. In many ways, the digital world has exacerbated these challenges and risks as children and adolescents engage each other around the clock across a range of devices and platforms. A common response by decision makers has been to pass new or update existing state statutes and regulations to require educator and law enforcement intervention when bullying occurs.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)