Experimental Infant Toys Let Your Baby Upload Selfies to Facebook
(Laura Cornet)
How young is too young to selfie?
Spotted by Fast Company, a new research project out of Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands called “New Born Fame” is looking this question in the face. Specifically, your baby’s face.
For the project, Laura Cornet developed a set of Internet-connected infant toys that would help babies upload pictures and activities to social media.
There’s a snuggly “selfie ball” with which the baby can snap a picture of herself and then post it to Facebook; motion-tracking shoes that register and upload physical activity; and an interactive pacifier that will upload the location of the baby (probably mostly just “chilling at home”).
(Laura Cornet)
In an interview with The Creators Project, Cornet explained that she would often see friends’ newborn babies on Facebook before actually meeting them in real life. She began pondering the ethics of parents deciding to create pages for and post pictures of children long before the little ones have any knowledge of what’s going on. So, as an experiment, she devised the Facebook- and Twitter-posting tools as part of New Born Fame to see what it would be like to cut out the middleman (in this case, the parents) and let the child maintain his own social media profile.
(The Creators Project)
“This generation of newborns is the first to be brought up by parents who grew up with Facebook. This results in the fact that nearly half of the newly born babies is visible online within the first day after birth,” Cornet wrote of the project on her personal website.
“I wouldn’t want that, but my research showed differently.”
Cornet says she received positive attention for her “products” and hasn’t ruled out the idea of spinning her research into a commercial line. A version of these toys that collect the baby’s pictures and activities onto a parent’s computer, or into a personal online account, rather than posting straight to social media, is something she would consider pursuing after graduation, she told The Creators Project.
Other research shows that, even without the help of these connected toys, about half of children are already getting involved in some type of social media before age 10. This is despite sites like Facebook having an age restriction.
But obnoxious tween posts about Austin Mahone are still better than an unstoppable feed full of fuzzy, incomprehensible baby selfies. So we feel like we can speak for everyone when we say thank you to Cornet for not unleashing the capabilities of these baby-spam devices onto our social network feeds. Of course, that’s not to say, if these toys did hit shelves sometime in the future, that we’re above reporting your pre-13-year-old to Zuckerberg’s goons for illegally posting.
Because we are not, and we would.
Have questions, comments, or just want to tell me something funny? Email me at danbean@yahoo-inc.com.
