Hi, and welcome back. I’m heading off for a one-year leave, so this is my last newsletter while Lately goes on hiatus. More on that below! In the meantime, please subscribe to Morning Update and Business Brief for a daily roundup of news from The Globe and Mail.
In this week’s issue:
🕵🏻♀️ How social media stalked me throughout my pregnancy
🤖 High-tech baby gear
🥵 Inside the world of steamy edits fuelling online fandoms
PRIVACY
How social media stalked me throughout my pregnancy
Hollie Adams/Reuters
As I mentioned in my introduction, I’ll be taking a year off to launch a very important new project. I’m having a baby! My pregnancy has been exciting, long, surreal and, at times, on the brink of dystopian.
Although I am a very online person, I attempted to keep my social-media feeds as pregnancy-free as possible. I didn’t want to fall down rabbit holes, so I purposely did not search or seek out anything pregnancy related on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook or YouTube, the platforms with the most insidious algorithms and the most likely to pull me into hours-long scrolling.
Yet all of the apps caught on quickly. During my first trimester, TikTok and Instagram started showing me content creators documenting their journeys trying to conceive, sharing footage from their ultrasound appointments and planning elaborate gender-reveal celebrations. As the weeks passed, the algorithms made sure to always show me creators whose pregnancies were eerily the same as mine gestationally.
I understand how algorithms work, so even though I wasn’t searching for this content specifically, I was leaving little breadcrumbs all over the internet when I Googled how to deal with morning sickness, searched Facebook Marketplace for strollers or read pregnancy subreddits. And every time I watched a full reel or TikTok of something pregnancy related, I knew the algorithms were taking notes.
Most jarring, however, was the whiplash effect of content I was being served up. I’d watch videos of regular women sharing symptoms and tips to get through nausea, then momfluencers showing off their Architectural Digest-worthy nurseries, followed by heartbreaking stories of miscarriages, still births and medical issues. From an artfully filmed “spend-the-night-with-my-three-day-old-baby” video from a lifestyle influencer to a traumatic labour story. I can’t imagine how these two types of videos would appeal to the same person.
Over the years, some have chronicled their attempts to shield their pregnancies from the internet. A couple years ago, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino attempted to keep hers a secret from her phone, deleting most apps, forgoing online shopping and Googling anything pregnancy related. (She managed to keep up the charade for five months. Satisfied by the experiment’s success and lack of ads, she bought maternity pants online and the diaper ads appeared on Instagram within minutes.) I wasn’t nearly this vigilant. Once I started putting together a baby registry, I was flooded with baby-related ads everywhere online.
In the world of data brokers, who are in the business of collecting and selling personal data to companies for marketing purposes, pregnant women are a lucrative demographic. According to a report in the Financial Times, identifying one pregnant woman is worth as much as knowing the age, sex and location of up to 200 people. Being in this highly sought-after market highlights the intensity of digital surveillance, whether it’s through targeted ads or For You pages. It’s enough to want to turn my mat leave into a digital detox.
Adult Money
BABY GEAR
The Nala baby monitor is Bluetooth and Wi-Fi free.Supplied
Levana’s Nala baby monitor, $130
I didn’t mean for Lately to be so pregnancy-themed, but since it’s my last edition for the next year, it felt impossible not to talk about some baby-related tech products – and not just because they’re all over my social-media feeds.
Before becoming pregnant, I didn’t realize there was a vast world of baby tech gear out there. There’s the Snoo, a $1,700 robotic bassinet that uses a series of sensors to automatically start rocking or shushing when it detects a baby is crying. The $420 Owlet Dream Sock, a device that wraps around a baby’s foot to track sleep quality and history, or the $430 Nanit, a baby camera that monitors breathing, detects crying and tracks growth.
Despite these gadgets getting rave reviews online, I decided early on that I wanted to be as low-tech as possible. Yes, I have concerns about data privacy and surveillance. But even more so, I recognize that so much of my life is already defined by technology and it felt important to start this new chapter with an analog approach.
I’m not eschewing all technology, however. I did get a video baby monitor, opting for Levana’s Nala, which comes with one camera. It has the main features I was looking for: a night-vision camera, a long battery life, and most importantly, no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
Culture radar
FANDOM
Photo Illustration by The Globe and Mail. Sources: margaux @(im)sosaneitsinsane/Supplied, Getty Images
If you’re a Heated Rivalry fan, or a part of another rabid fandom, it’s likely you’ve seen fan edits, made fan edits or reposted fan edits. They are montages of clips from TV shows, movies, musicians or other bits of pop culture, cut and arranged together with music, lyrics and sometimes special effects, and shared on TikTok, Instagram, X and Reddit. They often possess a cinematic intensity that rivals any trailer from a Hollywood studio. In fact, some major film studios have even recruited fan editors to make trailers, recaps and other social-media content, a major reversal from a few years ago when these same studios would accuse them of copyright infringement.
While online fandoms have been known to devolve into toxic spaces, notoriously rife with in-fighting or borderline-obsessive parasocial relationships, the world of edits remains a pure pocket of internet fandom, a way to build fervour among the most devoted and lure new converts.
Read my full story about some of the creators behind TikTok’s most viral edits.