London - This week, a young mother called Emma Bond posted some very special photographs on Facebook. They were of the moment she breastfed her severely premature baby for the first time.
One can understand why she wanted to commemorate the occasion.
Carene was born 12 weeks early at the beginning of this month. Doctors told Bond and her partner Ashley Kitchen that they did not expect the baby to live more than three days.
Somehow the little mite has pulled through. However, despite her remarkable survival, Carene is likely to have suffered serious brain damage.
Having been told that there was no chance of a future together, mom Emma is glad of any chance at all. When the baby improved so much she could be breastfed, it was a significant moment for them both.
Yet the question is, should that moment have remained private?
Forgive me, but I am old-fashioned enough to say yes, it should have.
The images of mother and baby are tender and beautiful, but they are also incredibly intimate. Why not keep that as a treasured keepsake for yourself and your child, instead of putting it online?
The impulse to share every detail of one’s life with friends, family, people you last spoke to ten years ago, plus random total strangers remains a mystery to many of us - but not to Emma Bond.
That is not necessarily a criticism, just an illustration of how young people feel compelled to live their lives through social media.
And of how the validation, measured in online clicks and signs of approval such as Facebook ‘likes’, has become so important to them.
In its most harmless forms, it’s absolutely fine. A great way of keeping in touch and communicating.
Yet in the fraught networking landscape, it is something that is only all right until it goes all wrong.
What was meant to be a quiet celebration of intimacy between mother and baby exploded over social media and newspapers this week. Bond, 24, originally uploaded the images to be viewed only by her friends and family online group.
Presumably it was one of their number who reported to Facebook that one of the images, which showed her breast, was offensive. Facebook promptly removed it because the photograph “breached nudity rules”.
I know. Rather ironic, considering the online blizzard of scantily-clad girls, self-harming, beheadings, violence, gore, animal cruelty, crime scenes and worse posted on Facebook and elsewhere. Yet this entirely innocent picture, which represented a beautiful, natural development for a young family, apparently offended.
From her home in Shropshire, Bond said it was like “rubbing salt in the wound.” She gave the image to an online breastfeeding support group, whereupon it went viral.
It was only after hundreds of complaints that Facebook reinstated the photographs.
So where does that leave everyone? Exhausted, I might imagine. Facebook must be feeling foolish. Breastfeeding support groups will be in a tizzy of righteousness.
And Emma must be wondering just who it was in her online group who may have betrayed her. Perhaps virtual friends are not all they seem after all?
However, Bond reserves her annoyance for Facebook. At the top of her grievance list is the fact that she has yet to receive “an apology or an explanation” from it.
She has my sympathy, but I also wonder if she forgot something very important when she shared, even overshared, this private moment in cyberspace: once you post those images, your proprietorship of them is over, gone with the wind. How the photographs are received and what happens to them next is not up to you.
As poor Emma has now discovered, something innocent and lovely can be twisted and misrepresented.
Unfortunately, it comes with the cyber territory. - Daily Mail