Skip to main content

Media Fodder

Nice essay on the temptations and perils of monetizing children. It might have started benignly even, the desire to share pictures of what you love and adore most in the world - your brand new baby. Though all babies are largely alike and are blessed with the same infinite cuteness, to the mother theirs is totally unique and that is how nature intended it. But the likes, comments, shares and reposts trigger addictive dopamine hits until over-sharing about that child becomes routine. The consequences can be bad for those kids who are being turned into media fodder without their consent (which they would be too young to provide anyway). In that sense, these mothers are no better than those pushing their children into labor. The difference is that later may have no choice given the crushing grind of poverty but the former do.

 ‘When mothers put little girls at the centre of their feeds,’ Bailey of BSM Media tells me, ‘I get uncomfortable … because we will look at the followers and there is a slightly higher amount of male followers.’ As more and more children front brands, this is not the only blindspot. We are (rightly) outraged if a dress is assembled by an eight-year-old sweatshop worker in Bangladesh; but we don’t think twice if that same dress is marketed to us by an unpaid, unprotected eight-year-old in the US. Influencer kids are not being kept out of school. They don’t live in crushing poverty and are not going to lose a limb if a machine malfunctions. But that’s not to say that their exposure extracts no mental toll. Performing your childhood for an outside, unseen and adult global audience can mess you up – just ask Macaulay Culkin.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...