Neil Hughes and Peter Davies as seen in Seven Plus 7.

A friend of mine has a two-year-old daughter named Rose who I’ve never met. But I know what she looks like, what her mannerisms are and on any given day, a few things she did last week. And not because I talk to her father. I know this because Rose, who is not yet able to read or write (even the most ambitious of New York kids can’t achieve literacy at 18 months) has a blog.

It’s unclear right now how long Rose’s parents intend to keep up the blog, which publicly documents Rose’s activities and development. Or how Rose, when she becomes old enough to realize that the blog exists, will react to it. After all, she’s not the only two-year-old with an Internet presence in New York. There are plenty of adorable camera-ready toddlers with Twitter accounts, YouTube videos, Facebook accounts and Tumblr blogs. The proliferation of technology would seem to suggest that constructing a comprehensive presence on the Internet may now be as commonplace a childhood ritual as notching the door every time junior grows an inch.

But it’s not without precedent. In perusing Rose’s blog I was reminded of the 1964 documentary Seven Up!, wherein director Paul Almond and his assistant, Michael Apted, selected fourteen children from various backgrounds and economic environments in the UK and filmed them talking about their lives, their personal preferences and their dreams for the future. In 1970, Apted took over the project, filming the children at age 14 for a new film, 7 Plus Seven. Apted has directed a new installment (the third was titled, fittingly, 21 Up) every seven years, with a few participants dropping out along the way, some because they were uncomfortable watching their lives play out in public. In May, the newest of the series, 56 Up, is scheduled to debut.

Almond, Apted, and fellow researcher Gordon McDougall originally selected the participants to showcase a wide swath of socioeconomic backgrounds with the hypothesis that one’s background could ultimately be a major determining factor in the children’s success or failure. English class structure is, of course, a bit more rigid than in America, so in theory we might reject that premise altogether, but as Apted follows the lively, energetic kids into their sometimes desultory and frustrating forays into middle age, it’s clear that a few of children had some advantages.

Take, for example, three boys from the same prestigious prep school: A young Andrew Brackfield, who reported at the age of 7 that he enjoyed reading the Financial Times, went to Cambridge and became a solicitor. Charles Furneaux is a successful journalist who did post-grad work at Oxford. And John Brisby (Oxford, natch) runs a Bulgarian charity.

Others didn’t fare as well—the women, in particular. Three working class girls from London (Sue, Jackie and Lynn) cycled through various jobs, divorces and missed the train to Oxford and Cambridge.

But all were, in ways both overt and subtle, affected by the films themselves. “Every seven years a little pill of poison gets injected,” says Brisby wryly after a few rounds of filming. Nick Hitchon’s marriage fell apart after his then-wife was upset by negative commentary about their relationship in 28 Up (“People saw the film and said, ‘This marriage isn’t going to work’” said Hitchon).  Feedback from the show began to shape how the participants behaved on camera, as they became more aware of how far reaching its influence was. The subjects became more self-aware, more considered in their speech.

In fact, it’s probably fair to say that the participants were experiencing the predictable after-effects of what may quite possibly be the world’s longest reality show.

It’s a bit too early to tell whether modern technology may have the same effect on this generation of toddlers, who will one day grow up to be 56-year-olds themselves, whose lives will have been documented far more continuously and comprehensively than a few hours of being interviewed every seven years. Apted’s conceit won’t be a new one by then, and we’ll have a large body of documentary work—both intentional and unintentional—that voluntarily chronicles the development of children from a variety of backgrounds, in both professional and amateur formats. (For the former, the 2010 film Babies comes to mind.)

And by then, living in public may not be as much of a challenge.

Reality TV seems commonplace, even normal. (Some of the participants actually seem like normal, sane people these days. The Bachelorette even recently featured an investment banker from New York—a species of contestant you’d think would be allergic to Klieg lights.)

But even more significant, Kids These Days are perfectly capable of documenting themselves—and more than willing to do so.  By the time Rose is ten, she’ll probably be updating her own Facebook page. And her Twitter, and her Tumblr, and a myriad of other web services that allow her to project the daily rituals of her existence to anyone with wifi connection. The Way We Live Now will have never been so minutely chronicled.

For this generation, individual narratives will be shaped as much by the participants as the observers. Rose will be her own Michael Apted, choosing to reveal her preferences, her socioeconomic status and the arc of her life and career in carefully chosen increments. The experience will be less a poison pill than a tiny periodic inoculation—a minute dose of arsenic to build up an immunity.

That is not to say that it’s a bad thing. If self-documentation leads to more self-awareness and studied examination of how other people view you, for better or worse, it facilitates introspection in a culture than doesn’t necessarily reward it.

Which is why when, a couple of weeks ago, a friend showed me a Twitter handle he’d reserved for a colleague’s baby girl and asked if I thought it was weird or inappropriate to offer the handle as a congratulatory baby gift, I thought about Rose and said, “No, no, I think it’s fine. Cute, even.” We wouldn’t want the new baby to be without a Twitter account.  Documentation of baby’s steps – and baby steps generally – start early now.

And better to grab the handle—before someone else takes it.