I was a baby-filming junkie. No significant moment of my son Isaac's first year went unrecorded. I filmed his first bath and his first taste of solid food. I was there, camcorder in hand, to document Isaac's first steps and there again for the inaugural banging of his Light and Sound Drum.
I don't know where this video mania came from. I have no videos of my own first year and I am fairly certain that no one is pining for them. I have not once wondered about the scene of my first bath. I have no hidden longing to see footage of six-month-old self spitting up pureed peas.
But if the urge to take the videos surprised me, I was even more surprised to find myself watching them. Isaac suffered from colic during his first months and my wife Jennifer and I were so exhausted by his crying that we could hardly stand by the time we put him to sleep at night. And yet, in the two or three hours we had before Isaac was due to wake up screaming again, we would gaze at videos of him as though we had never seen anything so fascinating.
Isaac does almost nothing in these early videos, and no bit of this nothingness went unappreciated.
"Did you see the way the corner of his mouth sort of moved?!"
"I swear I think he's starting to notice his mobile!"
We were masochists, hopelessly in love with our ten-pound tormentor. But our joy notwithstanding, our baby video addiction wasn't without its stressful moments. Realizing how selfish it was to keep a three-minute clip of Isaac lying motionless on his changing table all to myself, I decided to put a few of the videos on YouTube.
Jennifer was concerned. "What if pedophiles watch the videos of him in his diaper?"
I tried to imagine how I'd feel if I learned pedophiles had naked videos of me as a baby. It didn't seem so bad.
"As long as we don't know about it, I don't think it matters," I said.
"It matters," Jennifer said.
I looked into other options for sharing the videos, but the files were too large to email and using YouTube's privacy setting would have created problems for my technology-challenged relatives.
Jennifer and I went back and forth until we arrived at a compromise. We would put the videos in a YouTube category the pedophiles would never search and tag them with non-baby words like "backgammon" and "potato salad."
This seemed a fine solution but left us to debate which YouTube categories a pedophile would be least likely to explore. "Pets and Animals"? "Autos and Vehicles"? It was hard to know.
We chose "Pets and Animals." It's hard to be sure if we successfully eluded the pedophiles, but if there really are pedophiles looking for babies online, they have plenty of others to choose from. In trying to figure out what do with my Isaac videos, I discovered the obvious: babies are taking over Web video. To cite one wildly unscientific bit of evidence, a video search for baby on Google brings up close to 600,000 hits; sex, a measly 250,000.
On YouTube, you can find a video of a baby doing just about anything. There are babies breakdancing and babies eating tacos. There are babies playing golf (surprisingly well) and babies playing Frisbee (predictably poorly). There are dozens of videos of babies sucking lemons, and, if you don't have time to watch them all, there is also a video montage of babies sucking lemons. If you prefer your infant suffering drawn out a bit more, you can search "tantrums" and choose from a long list of screaming fits.
I could have guessed that YouTube would be overrun with baby videos, but watching the videos was another thing. Almost as soon I started watching, one salient fact jumped out at me: a lot of the baby videos were just like my baby videos. The babies, doughy and drenched in drool, were doing more or less the same things: pawing at the air, laughing hysterically at decidedly unfunny things, clapping in celebration of nothing in particular.
After looking around for a few minutes, I found nearly identical replicas of many of my videos: babies banging Isaac's very same Light and Sound drum with Isaac's very same uncoordinated abandon; babies bouncing in Isaac's very same Fisher-Price Deluxe Jumperoo with the very same look of borderline psychotic glee.
And it's not just the babies that seem the same. The parents in many of the videos are replicas of Jennifer and me. They "yeaaaahh" and clap and peek-a-boo and "Where's Mommy's nose?" exactly like we do.
Even more unnerving, the similarities are just as evident when you're watching videos of babies in other countries. The Korean and Mexican parents make the same bulging eyes, air-filled cheek faces at their babies as their American counterparts, and their babies laugh and pop their cheeks just as reliably.
At first, I didn't like watching my life played out in a Korean living room. The illusion of individuality is comforting. Sesame Street taught me that we are all special in our own way, and I would like to think that it's true. I would like to think that I am the only father who bangs his head against a Fisher Price Deluxe Jumperoo to get a laugh. But, thanks to YouTube, I know that this is not the case. Probably I am not even the only father who entertains his baby with improvised salsa moves to his own rendition of The Miami Sound Machine's "Conga" (although I think I probably am the only one who inexplicably substitutes the word "tuchus" for "body" as in "Come on shake your tuchus baby/ Do the Conga").
Still, if it was humbling to recognize my ordinariness, as I thought about it more, I also came to see something humanizing in watching other people's baby videos on YouTube. It's always easier to empathize when you can imagine yourself as the Other. And, now that YouTube allows us to watch everyone's once private home videos, you no longer need much of an imagination. At least when it comes to the parents of babies, one thing is now certain: the Other is just as in love and just as dorky as you.