It's not very often a defining moment in one's life is captured on film. I'm lucky to say one of mine was. In fact, nothing has been the same since, in the very best way.
I like to think that I’m a very tech savvy mother. I know where to look in social accounts for security flaws, I research apps before I allow my children to have them, and regularly check all their social accounts and followers. I know all their passwords and have access to their phone 24/7. They also must hand their phones over to me at 8:30 Sunday night and they cannot have them back until Friday morning. Until today I felt confident in my abilities to manage my children’s access to media.
There was a time, in the not too distant past, that when you wanted to know what someone was doing, you had to ask them. The reality was that you could go days, weeks, even months without knowing that a friend had been to Hawaii, or met a superstar backstage, or got invited to that really cool thing you knew absolutely nothing about. Now, of course, that's simply not the case. You need only pull you up your favourite social media app to find all your friends, family, and strangers doing way more exciting things than you in real time.
I recently had the honour of attending the Disney Social Media Moms Conference at Walt Disney World in Orlando. As you can imagine, like everything else Disney touches, it was magical. I am constantly in awe of the way Disney runs their business and as it was pointed out to us they are not in the “hotel and theme park” business but rather in the “guest experience” business. For a full recap of this event please check out these awesome blogs here, here and here.
Tonight I watched a teenage girl get on the bus at Disney with her parents, nose buried in her cell phone, texting at a furious rate. Her parents looked exasperated and a little sad. They were at Disney after all and were probably hoping that their time here would be spent laughing, sharing and connecting like families are meant to on vacation.
