A thought: Imagine tomorrow, when Kym grows up, she has someone who has a crush on her or wants to employ her or befriend her or hurt her and they want to find out more about her, her likes and dislikes, her favourite things, her childhood memories, her emotional triggers, her morals, her goals, her abilities, her entire evolution from a tiny infant to a fully grown adult. How easy it would be for them to scroll through my blog to get at all this information? How easy, then, would it be for them to manipulate her, knowing so much about her.
This used to bother me. Until I realised how much, left to themselves, teenagers are putting out about their lives online already. How easy it is to get such information as may be found in my blogposts about Kymaia. And how common this kind of data availability for almost all of us is and will be as we go forward into the future. There literally will be nothing secret. There probably isn’t already. Given enough time and resources online, I can find out almost anything about anyone in the world. Here’s the ironic part, though: most of them are giving away this information voluntarily. And guess what, it is already being used to manipulate you and your thoughts. So, honestly, it is only those of us who are in denial that are trying our best to withhold information we consider somehow (for no particular reason) sacred. I say, isn’t it better to put your version out there than allow people to extrapolate and tease out disparate data about yourself to form the wrong impression? Or maybe it’s just me. Frankly, only in hindsight can we decide who was right.
Of course, each of us draws the line as to what and how much of ourselves we really bare online and how much we and the subject of our sharing are comfortable with it. This, in our case, is an easily answered question. The day Kymaia is eligible for her own social media account (the age stands at 13 today), I shall seek her express and clear consent before sharing anything about her, even running the material past her before publishing. That’s a promise I have made to myself. And to her, even if she does not understand the import of it yet.
But till such a time, which seems, if the past 7 years are anything to go by, closer than it appears over the horizon, I will be documenting our journey together. Baby and Baba bear, on the same team. For ever. And ever.
