I just completed writing a post about taking my two year-old daughter to her very first major league baseball game. Throughout the course of that day I was taking video and documenting the entire experience for presentation here at Baseballisms.com. The entire purpose of this site is to be a niche, video version of Story Corps, capturing personal anecdotes about baseball for posterity sake. How wonderful I thought, capturing and sharing this video with Baseballisms viewers about my little girl’s first game and ultimately her progression into a lifelong fan of baseball, including my influence on that passion.
As I logged the video and started my initial edits to the segments, I started to have nagging questions in the back of my mind. Should I be putting this out there? Am I supposed to be exposing my little girl online like this? Does this constitute exploiting my daughter for the sake of traffic? My mind started down paths that I just didn’t want to go in this era of transparency on line.
I know that the site doesn’t get huge volumes of traffic yet, and the potential of the video taking off virally would be slight, but I do post all of Baseballisms’ videos on numerous video services and get decent viewer numbers. I have also had comments from strangers appear on our home videos posted on You Tube that have made me consider turning them into “private” postings. I wasn’t sure that I could wholeheartedly convince myself, and my wife, that this was appropriate yet. I have no problem putting myself out there, and love developing an entertainment brand where a community can exchange video experiences, but I just wasn’t sure about inserting my own daughter into the community.
So I decided to seek out people on line who I respect, to hear what opinions they might have, especially @samharrelson and @jimkukral who themselves have had their kids in videos that I have seen. In all cases the response was the same, everyone recognizes my uneasy feeling and understands this dilemma in exposing ourselves and our families in this online video age. It’s a hard decision, but one that ultimately comes down to each individual’s comfort level with exposure outside the previous boundaries of privacy, family and dare I say safety.
Taking all of the input into account, without a single definitive “post the video” .. plus considering any hesitancy probably meant that I shouldn’t post it …. I decided I was not ready to put my daughter’s video post out into the public realm at this time.
I want to emphatically point out that in no way do I have a specific lack of trust for anyone who checks out the Baseballisms.com site, in fact we have started to develop some great online friendships around the community. I’m sure that everyone here already has a sense of my family and how we live our lives. I am more concerned about the spread of a video with a cute, two year old little girl who graciously high-fives anyone who smiles at her .. and what the end result of that might be.
I will continue to twitter and post about what we are doing as a family, going to the park, attending festivals & ballgames ….. and later this summer having another baby! …. but it was simply the video component that held me back.
Do you think I made the correct choice?
Thanks for understanding.
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