‘When you realise your dad is Cristiano Ronaldo’: celebrity sharenting and children’s digital identities

ABSTRACT

Sharenting, or the practice of sharing one’s parenting or information about one’s children on social media, occurs in an increasingly platformized digital culture, where visual formats are central across participatory and commercial repositories. This paper investigates the articulation between sharenting as performed by celebrities and the wider construction of children’s digital identities. Through qualitative content analysis, this research looks at how Cristiano Ronaldo, the most-followed individual on Instagram since 2018, his partner, and his mother shared information about his children on that social media platform between 2018 and 2020. Through manual exploration, we searched for Ronaldo’s children across a variety of digital spaces. Our analysis reveals that sharenting on Instagram engages audiences through the portrayal of children as the parents’ extended self. Content from Instagram and news media is appropriated in vernacular and commercial digital spaces for conflicting affects: the cute father-son dyad, and the son as extension of the uber-famous, vain father. This extreme case shows how the digital identities of children of celebrities are widely public, formed by the everyday, intimate content of the family’s life, which is persistent and collectively recreated by news media, vernacular culture, and commercial platforms.

KEYWORDS:

• Instagram
• memes
• football
• affect
• family
• social media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The brown skin tone of the emoji affirms the ‘dark-white’ he is identified with (Hylton & Lawrence, 2015).

2 There is an immense catalogue of Ronaldo in gifs and stickers, mostly isolating facial expressions or moves on the pitch or with added text from his speech.

3 The author also notes that the meme series was remixed for other pairs of father and son, such as Neymar and his son Davi Lucca.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ana Jorge

Ana Jorge, PhD, is a Senior Researcher at CICANT and Associate Professor at Lusófona University. Ana researches children, youth and media, audiences, celebrity culture, digital culture, and her scholarship appears in journals such as Celebrity Studies, CyberPsychology and Social Media + Society, and collections such as Childhood and Celebrity and Celebrity and Youth. She has co-edited Digital Parenting (Nordicom, 2018) and Reckoning with Social Media (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). Twitter: @anajorge_

Lidia Marôpo

Lidia Marôpo, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal and a researcher at Interdisciplinary Center of Social Sciences/Nova University (CICS.NOVA). She has taken part in international projects and networks such as COST Actions Transforming Audiences and ySKILLS. She has published on different aspects of the relationship between children and media: the representation of children in the news, children as media audience and also as digital content producers, with a special focus on comparative research between Brazil and Portugal, in journals such as Journal of Children and Media and Communication & Society, and in books by publishers such as Palgrave and Routledge.

Filipa Neto

Filipa Neto is a MA student of Sociology at the ISCTE-IUL, and holds a BA in Social and Cultural Communication from the Catholic University of Portugal.