It seems the follow classmate Jaclyn and I have be thinking about the same issues of ownership and how they impact our daily lives, see her blog here.
I am not sure if it is that my life begins to reflect what I am doing in class, or my in class life reflects what I do outside of school, but more and more these two world seem to converge upon one another. Maybe it is just the my education has made more more aware of life around me.
Over Christmas my Father found my facebook page and naturally we became friends. Up until his request I have been unaware that he had a page, and that most of my siblings had a page as well. In the last few weeks it has been a landslide of family on facebook, which for the most part I am enjoying.
One notable exception to the enjoyment has been the addition of my oldest sister, B, to my friends list. Not because I don’t want her as a “friend” or because she has run amok with applications and such, but because of the issues of ownership (over myspace/facebook pics) we were talking about in class last week.
The first thing she did upon becoming my friend was to use facebook to take an inventory of my life, friends and morality (or so it seemed) and then email me all of her qualms with my existence. Her main issue seemed to be that I have pictures of children that are not “mine” in a photo album titled “People I Love.”
Three of the kids in question are her stepdaughter, son, and daughter and the rest of them are my god-children or family. All of the other parents involved have seen this part of my page and are comfortable with it, and all of these other parents (including B) have pictures of my daughter somewhere in there lives if not on facebook/myspace.
B, however, took issue with them being on my page, saying that I took “her” pictures off of “her” myspace and them put them on my page, and asked me to either remove them or change the settings of my page so that nobody else could see them, citing that he and her husband are really protective and don’t want just anyone to be able to see their kids and that these pictures are hers and I didn’t ask about using them.
She seems to really feel as if she owns these pictures and can therefore tell me what to do with them, but I question the validity of this statement. Most of the pictures in question were taken over Thanksgiving, when all of my family and upwards of twenty cameras were around. All photos were later collaborated and every member of my family has a disk with all 500+ photos and I am not sure that anyone of us can be sure who took what pictures. (Outside of the safe guess that you didn’t take the ones you are in, and Aunt R took all the one that look as If they are looking down on the room, because she is the only person that was spotted standing on a table.) But all the same, B thinks these pics are hers, either because she has the same ones posted else where, or because they may have been taken with her camera, or, more likely, because her kids are in them. Well my kid is in them as well and I am not excreting claim of them, they are pics, nothing more. But if her kids are in them, as is my kid, and my brother’s kids, and my other brother’s kids and so on, who owns the pic? Do we vote, one vote per kid? Or is ownership determined by who “took” the pic?
I would also venture to say that now they are owned by facebook and myspace as myself and many of other members of my family (including B) have posted them on both sites, and my removing them or changing my settings has little to no impact on who might see them. And if I subscribe to the idea of removing them from public space (which I can’t remove them from the WWW in any real way) do I then have to take them off my walls and not hang pics of these wonderful kids in my home because from time to time strangers enter my home to do things life repair pipes and change the carpet? How far do I have to go to make sure nobody outside of friends and family can see these kids? And does she then get so sort of approval system over my friends list, who is and who is not ok to be added and have the privilege to see her kids?
Also, does this woman never take her kids outside if she is so worried about “other people looking at [her] kids”?
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