I don’t remember how, but last week I found an interesting website: Babyspot. It’s like a Facebook, an online social space to network, but for babies. James Rivera, co-founder and COO of Babyspot, presents it as “a free and secure site that allows users-specifically parents-to create profiles that give them the ability to post news, pictures, and videos of their children for fellow parents and family members to see.”
My first thought about this was something like: WOW, it’s never too early to get into the web... But then I breathed and realized I was acting as a digital immigrant (which I am, indeed), not realizing that instead of being an artificial product offered to over excited new-parents, this is merely a well thought use of the communication resources currently available to us. It is something as natural as it was, twenty years ago, sending a long hand-written letter and a single printed picture of your baby to a relative living in a distant city.
However, I cannot avoid feeling amazed by the possibilities... Let’s think forward: 20 years from now, these online babies will be adults. And they will have detailed memories of their early lives. They will have not only some pictures and videos, but daily updates about their early achievements and also comments from their parents, their parents’ friends, relatives, and even from strangers. They will have an artificial memory – everything that our limited human brain is not able to retrieve from the past will be stored somewhere – easily accessible.
Here comes the digital immigrant again: I think there’s a reason why we don’t remember our early childhood in detail. What will happen when we grow up informed by these early memories? How different people we’ll be?
It seems I’m not the only one who’s thinking about it. Take a look at the pictures I took this Sunday from a store’s window in Stratford:
My first thought about this was something like: WOW, it’s never too early to get into the web... But then I breathed and realized I was acting as a digital immigrant (which I am, indeed), not realizing that instead of being an artificial product offered to over excited new-parents, this is merely a well thought use of the communication resources currently available to us. It is something as natural as it was, twenty years ago, sending a long hand-written letter and a single printed picture of your baby to a relative living in a distant city.
However, I cannot avoid feeling amazed by the possibilities... Let’s think forward: 20 years from now, these online babies will be adults. And they will have detailed memories of their early lives. They will have not only some pictures and videos, but daily updates about their early achievements and also comments from their parents, their parents’ friends, relatives, and even from strangers. They will have an artificial memory – everything that our limited human brain is not able to retrieve from the past will be stored somewhere – easily accessible.
Here comes the digital immigrant again: I think there’s a reason why we don’t remember our early childhood in detail. What will happen when we grow up informed by these early memories? How different people we’ll be?
It seems I’m not the only one who’s thinking about it. Take a look at the pictures I took this Sunday from a store’s window in Stratford:
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