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Like Sam, I too found "David After Dentist" more charming than creepy when I first saw it: David immediately got filed in the mental category "Awesome Little Kids I'd Like to Hang Out With," alongside Amelie Jr., the Korean "Hey Jude" baby, and Gio Escalante. I worry less that this video is cruel in the here and now and more about what David will think about it when he's a teenager or when he's applying for jobs. Will David be embarrassed? Proud? Will he be like a former child star, who can't walk down the street without someone leaning out of a car window to yell, "DUUUDE, IS THIS GOING TO BE FOREVER?"
What's really scary, though, is the speed at which this video has been remixed and re-posted—there's already a Dr. Katz-style animated version and a Christian Bale mashup. Maybe I'm being primitive about it (they're stealing David's soul when they copy his picture!), but that sort of gives me the heebie-jeebies. Something like "David" is different from, say, a clip of your kid on TV's America's Funniest Home Videos. Web stuff can move around the world so easily, getting copied and reproduced—not to mention archived indefinitely—that it's unnerving. I can make myself forget about this when I'm sharing information about myself. (I'm working on my "25 Random Things About Me" list, so I've been thinking a lot about the nature of my personal privacy threshhold.) But is it ethical when it's your kid? Now that my friends are trickling into their child-bearing years, I see infants all over Facebook. I'm not sure if this is due to the simple fact that since we live a lot of our lives online, it's natural that our kids are coming along, or whether it has something to say about the extent to which we view those kids as extensions of (accessories to?) ourselves. I'm sure that, when I reproduce, I will be putting lots of totally hilarious clips and pictures online. The question is: Will I be mother enough to hesitate before I hit "post"?