New Toy Lets Babies Post Selfies To Facebook

New Toy Lets Babies Post Selfies To Facebook
Laura Cornet

A baby mobile toy that lets infants post selfies to Twitter and Facebook has been released, to the delight of the parents of budding narcissists everywhere.

Oh joy unconfined! Now, as well as having your Facebook feed (once full of pop concerts and nights on the town) jammed with friends' pics of their children sleeping, sneezing, dribbling etc., you can enjoy the baby's own perspective on their lives.

And what kind of selfie can we expect from a baby? 'Just chilling in my cot #blessed'? Or maybe 'Think I'm gonna have one more rusk #YOLO'?

Yes, a Dutch designer has come up with a toy that lets babies set themselves up for a lifetime of superficiality by teaching them the connection between online over-sharing and emotional validation in the form of 'likes' before they're old enough to crawl!

Laura Cornet came up with the idea for the mobile toy, which automatically takes a photo and uploads it to social media when grabbed, after she became uncomfortable with her friends' casual attitude to sharing their babies lives on social media.

"It's weird to be involved in the life of someone who doesn't even know I have already seen everything in their life," Laura explained to CNN. "The babies didn't agree to having their photos put up online."

But her friends argued that it was harmless - not a surprising response, given that a survey by Microsoft found that 96 per cent of Facebook-using mums with children under three share photos of their kids on the website.

Intrigued by the debate over social media, privacy and children, Laura designed a mobile attachment that would take photos of the cot's occupant and post it online, and presented it as her graduation project at university.

The toy, called New Born Fame, was conceived as a tongue-in-cheek satire of our addiction to documenting our lives on social media, and Laura had no idea of turning it into a real product.

However, in a Kafkaesque twist, parents actually started to get in touch asking to purchase a New Born Fame gadget for their own babies.

Some artists would be horrified to see their satire become reality, but Laura remains phlegmatic. "When you have kids yourself, things change," she said. "Suddenly babies become cute - so I can't guarantee that I wouldn't do it myself."

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