A new generation of children are having their lives, from birth on, recorded and posted on YouTube.

I watched as Maelle's mother gave birth to her on YouTube [Warning: graphic content]. Born on April 12, 2007, Maelle became one of the very first members of Generation YouTube – a new cohort of kids who are being birthed on YouTube and having much of their lives documented by their parents' ever-present video cameras.

Over the past 20 years the internet has consistently surprised us with a series of social innovations in online media. The practice of formally documenting very private moments such as the birth of a child stands as one of the more unexpected outcomes.

Maelle's mother, who goes by the YouTube channel name Sociallyskilled, describes herself as a “birthing champion.” She belongs to a growing number of Americans who espouse unassisted home births – the delivery of a child without any professional help from mid-wives, doulas, nurses, or doctors. These “freebirthers” represent a peculiar manifestation of American individualism. They also often resist procedures such as routine immunizations for their children. The practice of unassisted birth carries with it obvious risks of extreme health dangers to both mother and child.

As with many fringe elements in society – some good, some benign, and some downright bad – freebirthers use the internet to gain legitimacy by attracting new recruits to their beliefs. In this way, the internet is playing an ever increasing role as a forum for evangelizing social practices that lie outside of the norm.

That the internet is challenging our notion of normative behaviour and legitimating new ways of being is indeed a good thing, for surely the “norm” has its limitations. By the same token, this is also a bad thing, for social norms act as guardians against dangers to the common good.

We can interpret Maelle's case as an instance of her parents trying to justify their lifestyle choices. As Maelle grows, we find on YouTube videos of her learning sign language, baking with her older sister, working on her ABCs, and otherwise being a normal healthy child. It is almost as if her mother is anxious to assure the online audience that she is indeed socially skilled and raising a healthy, perhaps exceptional, child. But at the distance at which we stand, we cannot be certain about the motives behind the parent's amateur videography.

We can, however, be much more certain about how home movie-making practices have changed in the digital age. Very, very few amateur movie-makers in the analogue era of super-8 film invited their friends and neighbours (let alone strangers!) to watch graphic images of home births. Largely because of YouTube, we now use our cameras on different social occasions for different motivations than we did in the 20th century.

Maelle herself is the subject of a grand experiment – the outcome of which will remain unknown for decades. Maelle and the rest of Generation YouTube are having significant moments of their infancy, childhood, and adolescence broadcast to the world. On occasion, in cases such as the video “Charlie bit me,” these memories become common property of the internet and are no longer under the control of the families involved.

Generation YouTube is being socialized into a different conception of privacy. Their lives will be defined by the unprecedented level of transparency that characterizes their media practices. This will be welcomed by corporations, which seek to gather as much data about our lifestyle and consumption choices as possible. It will also be welcomed by the state, which seeks to build profiles of the citizenry for its own purposes.

Between Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube, we have turned the internet into our collective family album, and in so doing we have entered an era of unprecedented personal transparency. Oddly enough, even as we do this, the centres of economic and political power are insisting on ever greater degrees of secrecy for their actions. The contrast between the secrecy of the powerful and the transparency of the rest may prove to be one of the more striking and consequential features of this new wired and wireless digital century.