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Paper short abstract:

Drawing on the definition of shareting as ‘the ways many parents share details about their children’s lives online’ (Steinberg, 2017: 842), this paper will look at how public figures tend exploit homeliness settings and parental duties as a tool in status consolidation.

Paper long abstract:

With connectivity having become a commodity, the undiscriminated coverage and, especially, sharing of everyday life aspects on social media blurred the borders between private and public especially at the level of family and children upbringing. Celebrities of all kinds (politicians, singers, sports people, bloggers, and so on) keep funs connected by making public images of themselves and their family in contexts of domestic authenticity which appears to be like those of their followers.

As networks ‘become dominant central logic’ (Varnelis, 2008: 145) with narcissistic (Webb 2013) content generation spiking celebrities’ children upbringing public dissemination, the struggle to feed followers new content becomes paramount in exploiting further Facebook as a ‘“modern day baby book’ (Kumar & Schoenebeck, 2015). This leads to a stereotypical portrayal of children and family lives which tend to ‘humanise’ the public figures making publics witnessing practices and images from the private dwellings.

Drawing on the definition of shareting as ‘the ways many parents share details about their children’s lives online’ (Steinberg, 2017: 842), this paper will look at how public figures tend exploit homeliness settings and parental duties as a tool in status consolidation. Besides the ways, this paper also looks as the reasons leading to shareting arguing that the images represent more the parents and children as agents for their parent’s status consolidation. Finally, the paper will also look at and assess the content the celebrity sharenting cogenerates either in line with or different from the intended meaning of the posts.