RESET E-Book

Elaine Kasket

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 470

Beschreibung

Join psychotherapist Dr Elaine Kasket as she takes us on a journey to rethink technology – and tune into what really matters. * Do your screentime reports make you wonder what you're missing out on in 'real' life? * Have you ever phubbed your partner on a date night? * Will your kids forgive your sharenting when they are old enough to understand digital consent? * Do you want to live a more balanced, present life? In a digital world full of distraction and noise, it can be so easy to lose sight of the relationships and people that really matter. Yet as this transformative book shows, it is entirely possible at every stage of our lives to make positive choices about who we connect with and how we share our world with the people we know, love and trust. Armed with Elaine's insights, you won't just think differently about technology. You'll feel happier and more empowered along the way. 'A critical reminder that, at every stage of life, we get to choose our relationship with technology.' Luke Burgis, author of Wanting 'Digital technologies aren't just transforming every area of life. They're transforming us… This book couldn't be more timely.' Catherine Mayer, author of Good Grief 'As a recent parent, this book really made me reevaluate the way I use technology around my family… One of the most thought-provoking books I've read this year.' Carl Öhman, author of The Afterlife of Data

Leseprobe

To the writers of the London Writers’ Salon: all those little boxes on the screen, and in each one there was a gift.

I am a lost person. I wouldn’t write books if I wasn’t lost. I wouldn’t write anything at all if I wasn’t in search of paradise, and I wouldn’t be in search of paradise if I didn’t need it; if I didn’t think I would be less lost if I were to find it. So I write to find it . . . but no, not that either, because I am nearing middle-age now and I know there is nothing to find. . . . There is no paradise out there, so I write to create my paradise on paper or on this blank, flat screen, but something in me always sabotages it and turns it dark. So then I write to reorder the world so that paradise might look possible again even for a moment, for someone.

– Paul Kingsnorth, Savage Gods

Contents

Introduction

1   Digital Gestation

2   Infancy

3   Early Childhood

4   Later Childhood

5   Adolescence

6   Adulthood

7   Middle Adulthood

8   Older Adulthood

9   Digital Afterlife

Conclusion

Appendix 1: Cultural Generations

Appendix 2: Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development

Appendix 3: Kasket’s Rebooted Techno-Psycho-Social Lifespan Model

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

Index

Introduction

At university, as virtually all budding psychologists do, I studied a man who’s consistently listed among the top ten most influential psychological theorists of all time: Erik Erikson.1 When we use phrases such as identity crisis, arrested development and midlife crisis, it’s his ideas we’re channelling. His predecessor Sigmund Freud said that what happens in early childhood decides who we become,2 but that didn’t ring true for Erikson – Freud’s theory of personality development was too inflexible, too deterministic, and didn’t capture how our socially embedded selves keep evolving as long as we exist.

So, from the 1950s until his death in 1994, Erikson developed an enduringly popular model of how biological, psychological and social forces continually shape our identities. If you search for ‘developmental stages’ online, it’s likely his model you’ll find first. Breaking the life course into eight sequential phases, from birth to death, Erikson described how people encounter a key turning point at each stage. He expressed these as tensions between opposing forces, one positive and one negative: Trust vs Mistrust for infants; Identity vs Role Confusion for teenagers; Intimacy vs Isolation for young adulthood. An individual who’s able to adopt helpful virtues such as hope, purpose, competency and love can better navigate and resolve each crisis at it comes, enabling one to move forward with greater psychological health and a stronger sense of self.

I know this because I wrote an essay about Erikson for one of my first classes in psychology, over three decades ago. I can’t imagine how I did it, by which I mean I can barely remember how research was possible in the late 1980s. I can picture where I did it: the library, because there wasn’t any other option for accessing information. Card catalogues were my search engine, and my sense memories of them revolve around touch: the handles of the drawers, the striated texture under my fingertips of a horizontal stack of densely packed cards. The ones for the core texts that everyone read, like Erikson’s, were dirty with fingerprints, their top edges worn soft from frequent handling. Research articles were listed in minuscule font in huge tomes I could barely lift off the shelf.

When I recall my internet-free psychology studies, my mind jumps to other realms of life then, to how different things were. The World Wide Web was scarcely a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye.3 Crossing Europe alone as an emergent adult, I visited the American Express office in each major city to ask if I had any post from home. My parents would have loved daily confirmation that I was alive, but it wasn’t practical. I was operating on 30 American dollars a day and didn’t have spare change for the payphone. I wrote travellers cheques and consulted atlases. When I lost the address and name of someone I’d met on my travels, I knew I’d never speak to them again. I shot several rolls of film, which seemed like a lot. I think I might still have the negatives somewhere, in a shoebox in a cupboard.

When I describe these wonders of the ancient world to my teenaged daughter, she looks at me as if I’m an elderly alien from another planet, and she’s not entirely wrong. Courtesy of the digital revolution, there’s a world of difference between Generation X and Generation Alpha.* But although she views me as clueless about how things are today, about that she’s not entirely right. Since my early days in a pre-digital learning environment, I have indeed kept Erikson’s twentieth-century ideas alive for my psychology students and psychotherapy clients, but I’ve also studied the intersection of psychology and twenty-first-century technology for two decades. My last major project, a book exploring what happens to our online personae after we die,4 really got me thinking. I realised I wasn’t just interested in how a person shapes their digital identity, which remains behind online when they go. I wanted to understand the other direction, too: how that online world and technology shapes identity.

In other words, I wanted to consider whether Erik Erikson’s map of the human lifespan still applies today, when so much has changed in the space of a generation.* I had both personal and professional experiences as motivation. Personally, I’m acutely aware of being in Erikson’s middle-adulthood stage, which he called Generativity vs Stagnation. Midlifers can either keep pursuing their ambitions and goals, or they can get stuck, and this normal crisis took on abnormal proportions for me during Covid-19, when all my work and most of my socialising shifted online. I wouldn’t have generated this book if I hadn’t been so keen to avoid the double stagnation threatened by turning fifty and pandemic lockdowns. At midlife, I find myself looking forwards and backwards, sandwiched between ageing parents and a teenager whose various phases of childhood I can still acutely recall.

Professionally, I’m struck by how much my clients’ dilemmas and troubles now relate to technology. People feel addicted to and fatigued by their screens. Parents stress over their children growing up digital. Romantic partners snoop through one another’s devices when they’re feeling insecure. Employees come to see me upset about productivity monitoring and metrics at work, or worried about artificial intelligence rendering their jobs obsolete. People have their identities and narratives upended through revelations unearthed via commercial genetic testing. The bereaved are traumatised by losing access to a loved one’s digital footprint, or by what they find out when they’ve accessed a bit too much.

Thinking about myself, my friends and family, and the clients in my clinic, I’ve realised that technology is the mediator and middleman in nearly every relationship we have in modern life, interwoven in the bonds between parents and kids, teachers and pupils, romantic partners, employees and bosses, midlifers and their elderly parents. We’re constantly making decisions about data and devices that affect not only us but other people – often our nearest and dearest. Ensnared by our digital habits, we can’t seem to wriggle free, and we fall into thinking and talking in particular ways about the technology that surrounds us – especially unfamiliar tech that disrupts, rattles or even frightens us.

In my roles as a psychotherapist and cyberpsychologist, I’m rarely asked how technology is affecting us, or how we’re using it. Instead, it’s a more forceful participle that’s used: impacting. We speak of tech as an active, powerful, unstoppable force, and frame ourselves as the victims: passive, without choice or agency. ‘What is this technology doing to us?’ people ask. ‘What is it doing to our relationships, kids, sleep, communication, self-image, attention, grief, privacy?’

I contend that we’re not as helpless as we assume, that technology influences but does not determine us. When we believe that tech has a monolithic impact on us, that it has unilaterally shaped our experience and behaviours, we’re bound to feel powerless. In a world dominated by technology, we often feel we’ve lost control. But we consistently underestimate the power we still hold to shape the relationships we have with and through technology, and to intentionally adopt the kind of mindsets that will help us negotiate psychological and social crises at every stage: in other words, to reclaim our lives.

In searching for a useful structure to help you do just that, I reconnected with my old friend Erik Erikson. The wisdom and insights of his life-stage model still speak to us today, and I’ll introduce you to them more fully in each chapter. Still relevant too – perhaps more than ever – is his concept of ego identity: the synthesis of your different ‘selves’ into one coherent identity over time, generating an ongoing, solid sense of self to help you navigate a world that is constantly changing around you.5 And that’s the thing: so much has changed since Erikson’s time that his ideas about identity development and thriving need a bit of a reboot for the digital age. That’s why I’ve created a whole new model – psychological, social and technological – to sit alongside his.

In this book, using this new roadmap, I hope to provoke and empower you.* I plan to disrupt commonly held assumptions and fears about technology’s impact, suggesting a different response to technology and its challenges at every age and stage: a response that connects you to your particular context and your personal values. For each phase, from digital gestation to digital afterlife, I’ll explore how and why you might be pulled into using and thinking about tech in particular ways, even when those ways aren’t helping you. I’ll try to awaken your curiosity and awareness about why you use technology the way you do. I’ll push you towards gaining greater clarity about how well those choices are working out. And, most importantly, I’ll invite you to commit to aligning your technology use with the things that really matter to you, and the kind of life and relationships you want.

Technology contains all the possibilities – good and bad, miraculous and disastrous, healthy and unhealthy. What you won’t get from this book is one-size-fits-all rules or guidance, because you are uniquely you, and tech is incredibly diverse and doesn’t have predictable impacts on individual people or specific relationships. Instead, you’ll gain a better understanding of your own experience of tech. You’ll come away with the internal tools and strategies you need to make tech serve you better, and the knowledge to assess the personal and relational consequences of choices you’re making more honestly and realistically.

So, ask not how tech is impacting you, but what impact you want to create with it – on yourself, on others and on a tech-obsessed world.

______

* See Appendix 1.

* See Appendix 2 for Erikson’s eight-stage psychosocial model.

* See Appendix 3 for Kasket’s Rebooted Techno-Psycho-Social Lifespan Model, 2023.

1

Digital Gestation

Springtime in Sawmill was dry that year. The previous summer’s tall prairie grass, browned by the Arizona sun, rustled in a high wind. At the slightest encouragement, anything could turn into tinder, and southern Arizona locals know to exercise extra caution on such days. Dennis Dickey would probably never have started a campfire on a day like that. But that isn’t what he and his friends were doing in the Coronado National Forest.

As with most special occasions in modern life, the moment is captured on video with the intent of sharing it on social media.1 A rectangular target sits amid parched grass, against a backdrop of stubby, shrubby trees and distant hills. A shot rings out, and the target blows apart in a profusion of powder spewed skywards with the power of Tannerite, a highly flammable compound. The clouds of dust are baby blue: the sex of a yet-to-be-born child has been dramatically revealed.

Dickey can’t celebrate the thought of a future son for long though. In milliseconds, the surrounding brush is awash in flame. By the end of the next day, 7,500 acres of land had been consumed by fire, and ultimately six times that acreage was blackened by raging flames that cost $9 million to extinguish.2

A state away, in southern California, blogger and mum-of-three Jenna Karvunidis wept as she watched the news. ‘I was just bawling when the forest burned down,’ Jenna says. ‘A cake isn’t good enough. People are exploding things.’3

The piece Jenna had written years earlier about her ‘gender-reveal party’4 had swept the globe the way internet sensations do, but it had featured a far less pyrotechnic gimmick. In her article, she’d described cutting into an iced cake to reveal the colour of sponge inside: pink for a girl, blue for a boy. But followers of the trend had found ever more creative and bizarre – and occasionally fatal – ways not to settle for cake. An alligator snapping down on a watermelon, spewing arcs of blue goo.5 An ‘inadvertent’ pipe bomb.6 A novelty signal cannon.7 A plane that pitched into the sea with its doomed cargo of two pilots and a sign reading, ‘It’s a Girl!’8 One expectant father never made it to the party – the ‘unspecified contraption’ he was preparing detonated as he tinkered with it in the garage.9

The foetus, snuggled in the dark of the womb and preoccupied only with the business of physically growing, is innocent of all this. Even at this stage it is social, genetically programmed to be so – twins in utero reach out for one another more often than they direct movements towards the self, supporting the ‘social wiring hypothesis’.10 Outside the mother’s body, the foetus is already socialising too, courtesy of its parent-created proxy, its digital avatar. As illustrated by the stories of drama and woe above, some of these are delivered via viral video.

‘Surrounded by friends and family, you suddenly discover the sex of your child in this ritual, the very first identity marker,’ says Tama Leaver, a Professor of Internet Studies at Curtin University in Australia.11 ‘This new person will be gendered in this manner, and identity therefore can begin! It’s a strange ritual.’

Strange, indeed, and stranger all the time. But the moment is ephemeral. The explosion fades away, and the cake will be eaten and forgotten. It’s not the party itself but the publication of the ritual online, and the effects that this has, that will continue to be influential for identity formation throughout the course of the future human’s life.

*

Erik Erikson and other life-cycle theorists of the pre-digital era never included the gestational phase in their models. Before the advent of the internet and social media, before millions of infants emerged from the womb to converge with digital twins that had been cultivated by family and friends for months, the time spent in utero didn’t matter as much for identity. Now, however, there’s rather a lot more going on in the prenatal period, and the digital milieu has created a novel context with new consequences.

For as long as we have had the means to determine the biological sex of a baby ahead of the birth, families and communities have engaged in prenatal gendering processes, painting nurseries particular colours, buying certain clothes, deciding on names that their society deems appropriate for a boy or a girl. Parents have spoken about their dreams for their as-yet-unborn child, and have made predictions about their talents, characteristics, interests and future profession. Maybe some of these parents even wrote these hopes down, in diaries or journals the child might see one day. What’s so different now?

Digital networks have four designed-in features that offline social networks don’t. Any information that’s uploaded on them is persistent, replicable, scalable and searchable. In other words, the data we share last, can be copied, can quickly grow in reach and impact, and are easily found by those with individual, organisational and commercial interests. Professor Sonia Livingstone, a prominent scholar of children’s rights in the digital age, says that this changes everything: ‘People must contend with dynamics not usually encountered in daily life before . . . They include the imagined audience for online posts/performances, the collapse and collision of social contexts, the blurring of public and private spheres of activity, and . . . the ways in which messages spread within and across networks.’12

Performances. Parties have attendees and performances have audiences, and ‘gender reveals’ almost invariably have both. Events once confined to the family and its inner circle are widely consumed – unsurprising, as they were likely concocted and executed with dissemination in mind. A large and riotous crowd of adults and kids was present at one of the above-described reveals, gathering rather too close for comfort to the enormous, open-jawed reptile. Each adult aiming their smartphone at this tableau – every visible adult present, except for the alligator wrangler – was almost certainly planning a far wider audience. You can still see the video everywhere online, including on a special YouTube channel: ‘2M Baby Gender Reveals: #1 Channel on showing the best gender reveal ideas. Videos Every Week!’13 This first identity marker for a male child, future scion of Kliebert & Sons’ Gator Tours,14 took place in the new world of ‘networked privacy’.15

Children have always entered the world carrying expectations upon their tiny shoulders, but predetermined impressions of them have never been so elaborated, so communal, so extensively networked and archived. Data about them have never been so available for consumption by close and distant, friendly or unfriendly audiences. The creation of this pre-established template may or may not eventually hinder an individual child in finding their own way, but an extensive digital public record has a weight that’s hard to shake off. Authoring your own story is more difficult when the first chapter – and perhaps some of the later ones too – were written and made public before you even came to be.

But even more critical for future identity development, perhaps, is the early establishment of parental habits and practices. What we see others doing online powerfully affects what we share ourselves, and the publicising of prenatal identity markers and information on the internet has become so normalised as to be often done unthinkingly: biological sex, sonogram scans, relatives’ names, hospital-visit details, planned names for the infant, due dates and data from pregnancy-tracking apps are all commonly posted online. If we’re operating on automatic pilot, our human tendency to align with the behaviours of others in our social groups will drive our decisions, and early parenting practices will solidify into habit. Sharing data about a yet-to-be-born child, if done repeatedly, gives birth to new personal norms and forges parenting styles and philosophies that may persist for the longer term.

Obviously, the developmental tension of this new life stage is navigated not by the yet-to-emerge individual, but by their parents-to-be and those adults’ wider networks and communities. Depending on which way parents lean during this new phase, either suspending prejudgements or making public predictions about identity, an anticipated child could be a blank screen or have a full-blown digital twin. The latter eventuality could provoke all manner of unintended consequences, leading to things that couldn’t have happened in the era before social media. The story of Jenna Karvunidis, the woman who invented the ‘gender reveal’ party, is a tale of this kind.

Jenna had blogged virtually since blogging began, in the late 1990s. As a single woman, she wrote about dating. When she got married, though, she shut that blog down and started a new one. ‘I don’t like that digital footprint,’ she says. ‘I didn’t need that stuff online.’16 Still, when Jenna fell pregnant, she still had a large following.

She shared pregnancy-progression photos, images shot from the side to show her growing bump, and talked about ideas for the baby shower. When she hatched a novel plan – a party where she’d reveal her unborn baby’s sex by cutting a cake – she blogged about it. The piece was a hit, picked up for a magazine that was in all the obstetricians’ waiting rooms in the US at the time. ‘It was my only time as a centrefold,’ Jenna jokes. Pregnant women everywhere read about her gender-reveal cake and thought, What a great idea!

The phenomenon spread like virtual and then literal wildfire. After yet another scorched-earth tragedy decimating huge swathes of forest, a critic piped up on Twitter. Who the hell came up with this gender-reveal business? One of Jenna’s followers replied. Oh hey! I’ve got your girl. Suddenly journalists around the world wanted to talk to Jenna about the monster fad she’d created. Many of them came to the interview with assumptions about what she’d be like, and her response to their questions surprised them. ‘I Started the “Gender Reveal Party” Trend. And I Regret It,’17 read the headline in the Guardian in the UK. ‘Woman Who Popularized Gender-Reveal Parties Says her Views on Gender Have Changed,’18 said the leader for the National Public Radio story in the US.

When Jenna cut into her first child’s cake, the crumb was pink. In the image accompanying many of the news stories, that child stands in the centre of a family portrait, nattily dressed in a blue suit and sporting short-cropped hair. ‘PLOT TWIST,’ Karvunidis wrote. ‘The world’s first gender-reveal party baby is a girl who wears suits!’19

The media stories portrayed her eldest child’s non-binary identity expressions as the reason behind her mother’s change of heart, but Jenna tells me that her stance wasn’t actually new. She was never trying to make a statement, she says; she was doing something she thought was fun at a party, at a time when gender wasn’t the hotly contested topic it is now. ‘It was never supposed to be about gender in the first place,’ she tells me. ‘You can’t know that at birth. You can only know what their body parts are.’

Jenna’s tale embodies so much about how the internet works. She shared a personal story in a public network at a particular context, at a certain time. Although she didn’t mind followers, she wasn’t aiming to go viral; she was just writing about something she’d done that week. She omitted her actual views on gender from her article because she wasn’t thinking about them and, anyway, the magazine wanted a lifestyle puff piece about parties. But people made assumptions, which is inevitable. Wherever a story is lacking, an army of creators and consumers on the internet will piece one together, even if it’s wrong.

So it was that, years after her post, Jenna became an unwitting and unwilling poster child for some of the most contentious debates of the day: sex and gender, nature vs nurture, and what forces influence identity. She says she’s grateful for the opportunity to set the record straight about her personal views, and to publicly advocate for what she believes. If she’d had a crystal ball, though, if ever she’d thought a gimmick she invented might contribute to a situation where it would eventually be harder for her own or any child to explore various aspects of identity for themselves, she probably wouldn’t have done it.

Some might dismiss Jenna as a professional blogger and frame her information-sharing motives as profit driven. This wouldn’t be the whole story – she’s a law student at the time we speak and considers herself an activist.20 In any case, though, most expectant parents aren’t professional bloggers, and their sharing about their baby-to-be doesn’t have global impact unless a disaster ensues. Instead, any online activities pertaining to their unborn child exert powerful influence more locally, co-opting families and communities into co-authoring a set of predictions about who and what the child will become.

Martell Jackson* is a retired professional athlete, depicted in poster-sized black and white on the ‘Home of Heroes’ wall in my hometown, powering down the field like a steam train during an American National Football League game, the ball clutched in his hands.

His first two children were girls, both grown into young women by the time he and I connected on Facebook. The elder was super smart but not sporty, which Martell found hard. When his second daughter showed the prowess but not the passion, that was harder. He pushed her, trying to build up a fire in her, but it didn’t work, and he had to accept that it wasn’t her path. Martell’s long-held dream of throwing a football in his backyard with a son was dwindling before he met his new partner, Jayda.

At the gender-reveal party for their first child together, a gigantic balloon hovers above their heads. To guard the secret until the critical moment, it’s opaque and black. A pop, a flutter of blue confetti, and the room ascends into chaos. At the centre of the jubilation is Martell, who’s punching the air with his fists, leaping ceiling high, and hugging his fiancée tightly enough to induce early delivery. Someone near the mic of the camera, perhaps the person holding the phone, is screaming, ‘LET’S GO! LET’S GO! LET’S GO!’ like a sports superfan cheering the starting line-up as it trots onto the field.

The video spread, with many people posting it on social media, including Martell. ‘Check my reaction!’ he says, adding a string of cry-laughing emojis. ‘This is how you respond to finding out it’s a boy after 2 girls and 18 years.’ Somewhere among the revellers are the two girls in question, but I can’t spot them or their reactions to this joyfully unhinged, blue-tinted celebration.

Facebook posts from and to Martell in the coming months celebrate the anticipated male child’s future sporting skills. Days after the announcement, someone sends a onesie and knitted hat with the emblem of Martell’s alma mater, the place his football career began in earnest. Someone jokes about how mad he’ll be if the sonographer is wrong. Someone else posts a cheeky photo of a skirted cheerleading outfit from the same university. Until the child decides their gender identity, keep those options open. The accompanying emojis suggest rolling-on-the-floor-laughing, not a pointed critique – he’s winding Martell up, and the expectant dad responds in kind: an unimpressed-face GIF.

Each gift is systematically photographed and displayed, and onesies are standard, in various designs: the Nike swoosh logo, Martell’s university insignia, the phrase ‘Destined to be Drafted’. On Martell’s own birthday, someone gives him a T-shirt emblazoned with BEAST and the image of a huge barbell, along with a miniature onesie that says BEAST IN TRAINING.

At points, Martell seems reflective about the culture of expectation he’s helping create. He posts that his future son doesn’t have to play sports but follows that by pointing out that he and Jayda both received top-tier sports scholarships, and that they’re not the only high-flying athletes in the family. DNA is real, he says.

His friends and family concur. Yep, it’s in the blood. That DNA is strong.

No doubt, I think. No doubt the DNA is strong. But in this nature-vs-nurture contest, with the baby’s due date still some months away, the race is already looking pretty neck and neck. When we speak, their first son is two and Jayda is pregnant with another boy, and most of Martell’s social media posts are about how his sons will continue the family tradition of sporting glory.

Martell admits he and Jayda have had tough discussions about what will happen if the boys don’t want to play. He hastens to reassure me, several times, that they’ll love the boys no matter what. But there’s a lot riding on it. For Martell, some of what’s at stake is deeply personal. ‘I had a decent sports career,’ he says. ‘But what a lot of people don’t know is that I feel like I didn’t reach the level I should have. I would like to see him eclipse anything I’ve done. I didn’t make it. I want him to make it.’

The first image I ever saw of Martell’s first son is on Facebook. They are in front of the wall of heroes in our hometown. Martell’s chest swells with pride, and he is cradling his tiny son, careful to support his neck. Their matching T-shirt and onesie read Team Jackson. Martell’s expression is triumphant, as if his son has made the team already, as though all the potential futures that exploded into possibility when that blue ticker tape floated down have already come to pass.

Martell isn’t thinking about that in this photo. He’s conscious only of this bond, this blood, this legacy, this love. He wants to show the world the two of them, together. ‘There is no such thing as an infant,’ said one of the founding fathers of developmental psychology, D. W. Winnicott.21 ‘If you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone. A baby cannot exist alone but is essentially part of a relationship.’ For Martell, the expectations and the relationship are intertwined, and he has no shame in showing either. His favourite expression is, ‘I SAID WHAT I SAID.’

Scrolling through Martell’s and Jayda’s Facebook feeds, I have my reservations about their posts, partly because of concerns about what will happen to all these data – more on that in later chapters. But I’m a digital-age parent too, someone who shared sonograms, and who posted an image on Instagram of my child’s future name, colourful magnet letters I’d arranged on a smooth white surface. Looking at Martell’s proud and joyful face, I understand his motivations. I have been there.

The concept of the ‘blank slate’ is as old as the seven hills that surround Rome. Few ancient residents of that city could afford to overuse expensive papyrus and parchment, so instead ancient Romans scribbled with a stylus on a reusable wax-covered wooden tablet, scraping the surface smooth again when a notation was no longer needed. In Latin, it’s a tabula rasa. Later, Freud would use that term when he theorised childhood relationships as key in the development of your personality. Parent–child interactions, he said, form the deepest inscriptions of all on your personal wax tablet.

On the blank slates that were Martell’s and Jayda’s male children before they were born, their parents wrote their hopes – including the one that maybe, through these children, the hurts of their own pasts could heal and their dreams could be more fully realised. Online, the same children were blank slates until their parents etched their hopes there too. From that point, many others came to make their marks, to record their speculations. Marks perhaps also too deep ever to wipe away: long-lasting, reproducible, scalable, searchable digital marks.

Tama Leaver, who also blogged personal information about the first of his four children before he researched and reflected more deeply, shakes his head ruefully at the story of Martell. ‘That kid, when they fail to get onto the high school football team, will be sitting in the shed, watching that video from fourteen years ago, terrified of telling their parents what happened,’ he says.

One of Tama’s research interests is sonogram-sharing – according to the results of a 2017 survey, more than a quarter of expectant parents share ultrasound images on social media.22 After all, in today’s pics-or-it-didn’t-happen culture, if you’re not sharing your sonogram on Instagram or converting it into a souvenir, are you even pregnant? One news round-up of ultrasound tchotchkes being sold online listed cakes, cupcakes, shower invitations, original prints, dog tags and lifelike dolls based on the scan image you submit to the website.23 If you haven’t got a good-enough image from the National Health Service (NHS), ‘souvenir scanners’ have risen in popularity on the high street precisely because ‘some want imaging souvenirs, such as DVDs or keyrings’.24

When he and his wife were pregnant with their first child, Tama reckons they were among the last people in Australia to be offered a VHS cassette tape of an ultrasound. For the middle two kids, the clinic handed over USB flash drives, perhaps branded with the clinic’s logo and website, but he can’t remember for sure. By the fourth, they were provided with a bespoke social media platform and strategy. At their suggestion that hard copies might suffice, the clinic staff seemed flummoxed.

‘They were like, oh, you don’t want to do that! We’ll send you everything,’ Tama says. ‘They SMSed the images, saying, share with your friends!’ With one click, the images could be sent on to others. He describes the changes from first to fourth child as ‘architectural’, a word that conjures the profound shifts in the fabric and framing of our lives.

Sonogram-sharing began as soon as social media emerged, and sonogram ‘pimping’ followed soon after. Writing about ‘maternal devices’,25 gender studies scholar Sophia Johnson found a literal example: a ‘Pimp My Ultrasound’ app enabling you to add colourful baseball cap, cigar and speech bubbles to Victor’s scan – or a tiara and tutu for Victoria, of course – and to share the results with your friends. Apps like this are marketed as a lark, a bit of fun, and of course they’re that too.

But at the same time, something more significant is happening here. By customising the sonogram on the app, parents are again shaping a future baby into a particular kind of someone, setting expectations about identity that might or might not pan out in the future. On one hand, this encourages bonding by ‘playing’ with the ultrasound image, imagining it to have a personality, making it feel less abstract and more real. When the completed image is shared, others can join the game too. Everyone gathers around to reinforce one another’s vision of what the baby will like and be like, as Martell and his friends did on Facebook.

It’s Johnson who gave me the name for the resulting social being, a hybrid between the hidden, carbon-based life form in the womb and the visible, ‘pimped-up’ being that exists in the digital sphere. Cyborg foetus.26

Sharing anatomical photos of the outside of your body might result in your being banned from social media but sharing the inside gets past the censors. You might find it either fascinating or off-putting when people share scans of whatever sort, and some might consider it poor taste or too much information to display the interior of one’s uterus. But it seems as if the consequences of such a decision would be levelled primarily at the excited parents-to-be – the occasional criticism, muting or defriending. But Tama describes how his sonogram-sharing back in the day was, in retrospect, ‘a terrible idea’.

Why might it be a ‘terrible idea’ for the child? Where’s the harm? At the prenatal stage, issues like facial recognition or safety considerations seem irrelevant. To the untrained eye, once you’ve seen one blobby, monochrome, vaguely baby-shaped sonogram, you’ve seen them all.

‘Let’s say you share the twelve-week sonogram on Instagram,’ Tama says. ‘You pull out the phone and take a picture of the screen at the clinic. Just a bog-standard sonogram has the mother’s name, scan date, estimated date of birth, location of the clinic. All social media platforms process images by firstly saying, is there text in here? Can we pull this out? If it’s in image form, it’s [easy] to pull that information back out as text. Secondly, it’ll look for metadata. Where was this taken? When? What other information can we extract from that?’

This is consequential, Tama says, because the moment Facebook or Instagram detects another person, even a person not quite yet born, they start a profile. Such platforms don’t just profile the person who’s decided to set up an account; they maintain profiles of anyone connected to them – child A and child B of This Named Person, whose dataset could easily be reconnected to their identity when they reach maturity. ‘It starts to . . . build the idea of so who is this, what do we know about them?’ Tama says. ‘If that profile starts before they’re born, [because of] the amount of information you’ll already have on the system by the time they turn thirteen and sign up [themselves], that profile will be so much richer.’

One could argue that the data self will be born soon enough anyway, once the physical child has arrived, and that perhaps there’s no downside in starting it a tad early. But, as Tama points out, any ‘Coming Soon!’ announcement creates an expectation in a community of close stakeholders and curious enquirers. If you don’t spontaneously share when the actual event occurs, you’ll be nudged to, increasing the possibility that you’ll keep doing so. Has the baby arrived? Post some pictures of the baby! If parents who don’t share information about their children online are unusual, expectant parents who start sharing prenatally and then go silent when the child is born are probably vanishingly rare.

‘[Expecting a baby] is exactly the time you most want to share, and you’re least likely to think through the consequences of that, years down the track,’ Tama says. ‘You’re in the moment. And once you start sharing that stuff, it’s hard to turn around and go, oh, now my beautiful baby is born, I’m not going to show you. You don’t do that.’27

We’re constantly nudged to share because the digital environment is designed that way. The so-called ‘surveillance capitalists’28 desperately want us to disclose information about both our identities and those of everyone we’re connected to. Every scrap of data about you is hoovered up and commodified to the maximum extent possible, for power and profit. Google now knows you well enough to send you ads for things you’re contemplating purchasing, without your having to search for anything online or say something out loud in a landscape bristling with ambiently listening devices. You might dislike this for the creepiness factor alone, but the manipulation often works. As mindful and in control of your choices as you attempt to be, you’re still likely to be buying the baby gadgets, kitchen appliances and shoes you don’t need. And you’re an adult, with conceits of self-determination and aspirations to self-control.

If these impulse purchases are hurting anything, it’s likely only you, your bank balance and, depending on what it is, the planet. But if sharing a sonogram today might unthinkingly establish a parental information-sharing habit that will eventually result in a fully profiled teenager being served whole into the waiting jaws of surveillance capitalists sixteen years from now, perhaps that’s something to ponder. You never imagine, when you’re uploading an in utero image of your future baby, that this small action at such an early stage might render your child more effectively manipulated or exploited later. Any social media disclosure choices parents make about the pregnancy at that point naturally feel as though they concern only them.

‘Relational maps of families and children are so valuable to companies because it’s not just [about] what’s happening today,’ Tama says. ‘The value of that pre-formatted young person, when they end up using one of these services, shouldn’t be underestimated.’

One day, many people in a child’s orbit will contribute to that little person’s digital footprint. One day, the child will throw their own hat in the ring. At sonogram stage, though, parental control is near absolute, and the choice to share personal information about their child is largely theirs. Yet, caught up in the moment, unaware of the present and future reach and power of the audiences on the other side of their screens, over 25 per cent of parents share that image.

That statistic is old, by the way – ancient, in fact, on the digital-technologies timeline. Searching for and failing to find a more up-to-date number, I instead find myself directed to editable birth announcements on Etsy. Pink fabrics, pink baby shoes, blush-coloured flowers, baby clothes and a blush-coloured rose. ‘We are excited to say, our sweet little lady is on the way.’ Atop all these stereotypically girlish items is the space for the sonogram image. The listings say how many times the downloadable designs have sold lately, nudging the potential purchaser to pull the trigger. The images are clean, colourful, visually appealing and – importantly – square. Tailor-made for Instagram.

I wonder how many people now go straight from their scan to searching out a social media template like this. ‘The challenge is getting through to people so they’ve front-loaded that thought process before they see that first ultrasound,’ Tama says.

The thought process he means is deliberate rather than automatic, reflective rather than subconscious, aware of values and goals. Unfortunately, our digital environment actively undermines our awareness that we’re engaging in habitual, learned behaviours – hence the phrase ‘automatic pilot’ – so we keep clicking, sharing, scrolling and liking. Habits don’t have to be permanent, but to disrupt them you need to be sensitised to them, something that’ll probably happen as you read this book. Before you can consider whether habits serve your goals and values, you have to notice them and become uncertain. Discomfort with how you’ve been habituated is a necessary prerequisite for change in a digital environment that’s forever pushing you around.

But perhaps you’ve checked in with yourself, and you’ve decided that sharing your joy and your family news online is entirely consistent with what matters to you. If you want to feel deeply connected with your unborn child, and representing it online and sharing it with your community helps you do that, then such activities seem to meet your needs. When I was expecting, I shared plenty of words and images on social media about my future baby’s sex, expected gender, due date and name. This was partly automatic, learned behaviour, but partly a conscious choice that I hoped would bind me more closely, at an important time, with far-distant members of my tribe. But I was a mother-to-be, and it didn’t feel as if I was doing anything bad by sharing personally sensitive or identifiable data. It just felt like care.

Something else just feels like care in these times too: using technology to track and monitor your offspring from gestation forward. Prenatally, the focus of that monitoring can really focus only on growth, movement and health, and options for all that are limited between scans. But popular pregnancy-tracking apps gamify following the foetus’s growth, instilling the idea good and early that part of being a good and loving parent in the modern age is keeping close tabs on what’s going on. This week your baby is the size of an avocado!

Watching, storing, processing and sharing digital data about people has come to be known as dataveillance. Edward Snowden’s revelations about dataveillance conducted by the US National Security Administration (NSA)29 has given it a bad rap, associated it with capitalist and government bogeymen watching and controlling us for nefarious purposes, an invasion and exploitation of the less powerful by the more powerful. But a hefty percentage of the watching is conducted by parents on children, including the unborn. In that relationship, words redolent of Google, video doorbells and spies in the NSA don’t quite fit. Deborah Lupton, an Australian sociologist who’s an expert on the digital child, adds an adjective: caring dataveillance.30

While they’re caring for the growing baby-to-be by tracking and surveilling, parents are also trying to care for themselves. They’re scratching that itch we’ve all got now, the temptation to quantify all sorts of things we never monitored before, especially when those things have to do with one of our favourite subjects: our own bodies. The fetishisation of personal physiological data is the force that keeps you checking the primary-coloured movement circles on your FitBit or Apple Watch and pushes new parents to buy apps that enable them to size up their foetus against an array of increasingly large fruits and vegetables.

Pregnancy tracking might be fun, satisfying and reassuring, but it’s more than that. When shared with others on Facebook or Instagram or other platforms, it gives mothers, in particular, a certain social capital. We’ve always expected parents to safeguard their kids and looked to women to be ‘good mothers’. That role’s always included hovering, watching, looking out for the safety and health of children both born and unborn. The digital age didn’t invent that expectation, but modern technologies have kicked it up a notch. By sharing updates about your pregnancy with your online community, you’re signalling something to others, something you might be feeling anxious about yourself. Maybe, in fact, you’re using those technologies to assuage your niggling worries, your insecurities, your ignorance. You’ve never had a baby before, you’re clueless, but it’s okay – you’re using all the apps. This baby’s in good hands. I’m a good mother. I’m a caring dad.

Deborah Lupton sounds a cautionary note about caring dataveillance, a paradox: ‘Any discussion of the ethics of caring,’ she says, ‘needs to acknowledge . . . these practices can both open and restrict freedoms for the watched subjects and those who engage in watching.’31 Through caring dataveillance, some watchers might obtain freedom from social isolation or from worry. The watched, in this case the unborn, might be the ones who are restricted: in both the freedom to find their identity, and in their ability to protect it.

In a big-data world with rapidly advancing machine-learning and analytic capabilities, many uses of unborn children’s information are yet to mature. When novel applications of that information are discovered and deployed, at a point too far over the horizon for us to see clearly, the consequences may race away from parents’ original intentions as rapidly and uncontrollably as, in the wrong conditions, a spark bursts into flame.

Some types of data generated on foetuses, such as medical records and statistics that could be aggregated and analysed to identify and treat congenital problems, might reap huge benefits for society. Other kinds, including identifying information shared and digital avatars constructed pre-birth by expectant parents, are fed directly into an ecosystem that is forever seeking to exploit data for profit. The health insurance companies looking to spot and predict future health conditions and deny people coverage. The advertisers developing hyper-targeted marketing strategies, using everything they know about young people’s weak spots to sell them what they supposedly need to be the person they want to be. The fraudsters, more skilled at impersonation every day with the aid of cutting-edge tech. Thanks to the information their parents and caregivers once shared on the internet, millions of today’s children might find themselves fraud victims by the 2030s.32

Prenatally, and for a few years to come, a child won’t be able to make its own data decisions, and cannot explore or shape its own identity. Parents and communities are their proxies, the only ones capable of asking themselves how their actions will shape the expectations that accompany that baby’s emergence into the world. Parents can choose to hold the future personality in suspension, limiting how many identity markers and how much commentary they publish in the digital sphere, or they can make predictions that might become self-fulfilling prophecies; that might turn into conditions of worth that the child might or might not one day meet; or that compromise their offspring’s future data security.

Actions tend to harden into practices when three things happen: when we do those actions a lot, when behaviours are triggered and encouraged by our environment, and when we fall into performing them as easily as breathing, without thinking about our goals or what’s motivating us.33

Because the social media environment is tailormade for habit formation, so many of our digital parenting habits are formed prenatally: disclosing personal, intimate information about a new person who has no input or agency; tracking the foetus through the ‘datafied baby’ on your phone; including your future child in the information you regularly share within your networked public; and using information about that child in ways that gain you social capital, even in ways that constitute performance, such as a gender reveal. That social reward might not be consciously on your mind, but as with many habits, the subconscious is in the driver’s seat, setting a course that so often can take you away from your goals and values – if you let it.

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* Names have been changed throughout this section.

2

Infancy

The Owlet website radiates reassuring colours: light cool greens, whispers of beige.1 Certain words are prominently displayed and repeated like mantras, balm to a new parent’s ears. Sleep. Rest. Peace. Easy. A scrolling selection of quotes from relieved customers features at the bottom of the landing page, containing descriptions of the anxiety and exhaustion they once suffered, now so far behind them. Navigate to the ‘Why Owlet’ page, and you’ll stumble into a gallery of cuteness: toothless smiles, chubby cheeks, bright eyes.2 Accompanying each image is a story.

The rising action is subtle, conveyed through foreshadowy adverbials. He was a seemingly healthy baby. At that point her oxygen levels were fine. Initially he was breathing okay. Through these subtle linguistic intimations we understand, with a chill, that the tiny helpless baby is in mortal danger. If the parents are lured into a false sense of security now, if they make one wrong move at some imminent moment, all will be lost. A video running silently on loop on the home page captures the creeping psychological dread of this phase of the narrative. A mother opens the door into a dark bedroom. The hallway behind her is bright, but not enough to illuminate the corner where the child’s cot sits. The mother’s brow creases, and her eyes fill with terror. Is the room too quiet? Is the blanket moving?

The story’s climax is the stuff of nightmares. Her oxygen levels dropped. His eyes were open, but he didn’t respond. I put my hand on her chest, and it wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing. The parents shake their children, scream their names, yell to their partners to call 999, and rush pell-mell to the hospital.

But then the action falls. Each child in the photo gallery is wrested back from the brink of death. After the abject horror of that night, the babies grow up happy and healthy. The parents become calm, rested and productive, with all their past traumas healed and all present and future worries spared, because the resolution of the tale is always that the precious, vulnerable child never again goes to bed without their £289, blood-oxygen-monitoring Owlet Smart Sock.3 While the app glows green, parents can relax. Across fifty testimonials on Owlet’s UK website, the phrase ‘peace of mind’ appears thirty-two times.

Welcome to parenting through the interface.

Previous generations have somehow managed without it, so do parents need ‘baby tech’? When you rarely venture more than a few metres away from your non-ambulatory child, how much value can an expensive bit of gadgetry, whether a new-fangled baby monitor or cloud-connected sock, really bring to your life? And how can digital tech have much influence on tiny people who can’t track images flickering across a screen with their eyes, or grasp devices in their minuscule hands? From the baby’s vantage point, infancy must be a pre-digital Garden of Eden, a time of innocence before that first Apple.

Erik Erikson said that the developmental task for the baby is navigating Trust vs Mistrust. The baby needs to trust its carers – and by extension the world – but the carers want something to rely on too. Before we had fancy monitoring technologies, harried parents turned to elders and more experienced peers for guidance. Then they started trusting distant experts: doctors and psychologists began telling us how to parent from the eighteenth century onwards.4 The American paediatrician Dr Benjamin Spock published the first childcare advice bestseller just in time for the post-Second World War baby boom,5 and eventually parenting advice became a multibillion-pound industry of warring gurus.6

The opinions of these experts have varied about which infant-care methods best set babies up for life. In one corner, we have a camp advocating discipline and timetabling, arguing that strict sleeping and feeding schedules and letting babies ‘cry it out’ will ultimately render children more resilient, independent and able to soothe themselves.7 In the opposite corner we have the camp encouraging proximity and close, supportive contact between parents and babies, known as sensitive/responsive parenting.8

The jury’s not out on this: it’s the latter parenting style that has been shown to be most beneficial for babies,9 but it’s not always easy to deliver. Round-the-clock sensitivity and responsiveness require a lot of time, presence and flexibility, and the social and economic world today is faster paced and more demanding than it was when some of the original proponents of responsive parenting were preaching their gospels.

In mid-century Britain, for example, paediatrician and psychoanalyst Dr Donald Winnicott regularly took to the radio to encourage ‘ordinary devoted mothers’ to parent instinctively and go easy on themselves for imperfection – ‘good enough mothering’, he said, was optimal for babies.10 But employment outside the home was increasing, and mothers who tried to combine work and parenting faced a lot of stress and often harsh judgement.11 By the liberated 1970s, when Penelope Leach picked up the torch as a responsive-parenting advocate, she got pushback. One newspaper retrospective of her career tagged her as ‘legendary for making mothers feel guilty’.12

So, historically, even being a ‘good enough’, responsive parent while simultaneously maintaining your sanity sometimes feels like solving an impossible puzzle. But what if technology could enable you to have both?

Now that we have mod cons for infants, the utopian promise of today’s baby tech is that it can make you the ultimate expert on your baby; create an environment that is exquisitely reactive to their every need, even if you’re a parenting novice; and have an easier life for yourself into the bargain. With babyveillance – the portmanteau word for infant-monitoring technology – perhaps we don’t have to settle for ‘good enough’ parenting. In an optimised twenty-first century, where there’s a technological solution to interpret, anticipate and respond to your child while making things simpler for you, why not do it?

Well, that depends on whether baby tech really facilitates the kind of care that matters most for those babies, and it’s up for debate whether today’s monitoring results in your infant being merely surveilled or truly seen. The new developmental challenge for wired-up babies, closely related to Erikson’s Trust vs Mistrust, is Connection vs Isolation.

Baby tech claims to be capable of incredible things to make parents’ lives easier and babies’ lives better. Trawl the internet, and you’ll find all sorts of innovations designed to assuage the worries of Gen Alpha’s parents.

With infant wearables such as the Owlet smart sock, you can receive heart rate and oxygen-saturation reports on your phone, beamed through the Cloud. Smart cribs such as the SNOO and the Sense2Snooze13 detect your baby’s cries and respond with movements that mimic someone stroking their back or rocking the cradle. The Cubo AI Sleep Safety Bundle, which proclaims itself to be the first AI monitor, tracks microscopic movements, produces sleep analytics and alerts parents if the infant becomes stuck rolling over or gets its face covered in blankets.14 The Nanit Pro combines calming white noise and lullabies with a climate sensor.

The Cry Translator smartphone app claims to discern, based on a five-second recording, if a baby is hungry, sleepy, uncomfortable, stressed or bored – the kind of insight I would have paid thousands for on a memorable transatlantic flight.15 By understanding a cry’s true meaning, you’ll mount a more rapid and effective response, the website says. And that might not just matter for that moment, it continues – it might matter for the rest of your child’s life