Friday 29 July 2011

Social media baby! a step too far?

A month ago, I gave birth to my second baby, a beautiful baby girl at 5.40 am.
Shortly after, hubby and I started to announce to the world, Those of you who know me, will know that I used to be an online marketing manager and that I've been a fan of social media for a very very long time (I've been on twitter since 2007) I'm a bit of a geeky girl and I love a gadget or two but I'm also quite traditional... Hubby asked my father before he proposed to me because he understood it was important to me, and I'm currently living a 1950's housewife lifestyle! at home raising the babies, cooking and cleaning (well, I try to!).
When it came to announcing our daughter's birth, the rules were simple, close family and very close friends first, then other friends and then social media last - I'm a twitterer and facebookerer and so is hubby. For me, a lot of fb is to keep in touch with friends from stages of my life (raised in the north, uni friends, career friends, yummy mummy friends etc...)
So imagine my surprise when I started getting tweets and fb messages before I'd even spoken to my Nanna and Sisters, before hubby had finished his announcements and certainly way before either of us had tweeted or fb'd the news!
At the time I felt quite upset about this, who gave the right to other people to announce such exciting news for us? especially before we'd finished telling family!
I'd decided to hold this post until I didn't feel so emotional about it, and I'm not so upset anymore.
Am I over reacting in such an open world, where even the birth of your baby isn't your news to share, isn't up to you to dictate who should know first? for an old friend I haven't seen in ten years to know before my sisters?
Personally, If I was privileged enough to hear someone else's good news, I'd like to think my first point of call wouldn't be to announce on social media, particularly if the person with the news had not yet announced it to the interweb!
Perhaps I felt upset over nothing, after all, it was the kind of news I was going to share anyway and the lovely messages I received are ones that were a delight to receive.
I wonder if the people who tweeted and FB'd before we did, if the situation was reversed - how would they feel? If I received exciting news from them and shared it on twitter/fb before they had, would they be upset or delighted or not even notice that it wasn't announced by themselves!

Emma in Bromley xx

2 comments:

  1. oh no! I felt the same. My sister lives in Mexico and when i had my son two years ago she'd already seen photos on fb before i could tell her i'd had him due to an over excited mother in law! it's rude and well out of order. next time, i'm banning everyone! x

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  2. This is really interesting and I totally understand your upset at the excitement of making that news being taken away from you.

    A friend of mine announced my pregnancy on FB when I hadn't actually told everyone myself yet - she was only excited and I never said anything to her about it as I didn't want to appear churlish.

    But I didn't actually reference my pregnancy on Facebook until much later as I felt it was a private thing and I would have rather it had not been mentioned so early on such a public forum.

    I do feel that social media has got out of hand and, actually, my hubby says he doesn't want to put any pics of our baby on Facebook when the time comes (he rarely uses FB at all) and I can sort of see his point!

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Thank you for your comments

Emma x