Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (16 page)

Recently, I was having dinner with a friend who runs a popular blog with an A-list actress. During this particular dinner, she told me about how the actress recently said, “I don’t think I’m going to go on Twitter today, because I don’t feel like seeing people tell me to die.”

That’s why I’ve always been an advocate for people using their real names and identities online. This was a decision we made early on at Facebook. We quickly saw that when people used their real names, they were much less likely to write horrible things, because their identities were attached to everything they said! They couldn’t hide from their nasty words, so they were much more thoughtful before writing or posting.

The lesson for our families is that, as part of the conversations about safety we have with our children, we need to talk about the importance of authentic identity in staying safe online. When we participate in the networks and services where we can interact as ourselves, we are generally operating in the clear light of day and can stay away from the dark side of the web.

Of course, there are always exceptions to every rule. When you are yourself online, you can invite abuse or harassment that begins in the offline world and follows you online, or vice versa. Because we have one integrated identity these days, there can be no respite from a determined bully. And, in a sense, sharing in the digital age means we’re always on a real-time performance review, every second of our lives. I used to turn to only my closest friends if I wanted to hear brutally honest opinions about myself. On the Internet, I get that from everyone. So much so that whenever I go home, the
last
thing I want is more harsh criticism. From my family, I seek out more nurturing, support, and positivity.

There are ways we can deal with this. One is to teach our kids to respect other people online just as they would want to be treated themselves. If we do our part, we can make the Internet a better place for everyone. As we know, good behavior can be contagious.

Daniel Cui was a freshman high school goalie on the varsity soccer team living in Hillsborough, California. After he failed to stop an opposing team’s game-winning shot, a small group of students began posting photo albums of him on Facebook with the caption “Worst Goalie Ever.” Daniel was embarrassed and humiliated and didn’t want to go to school. But then Daniel’s friends and supporters rallied. Another group of students began changing their profile pictures to ones of Daniel as a way of showing solidarity with him. Hundreds of students went on to express their support.

The next day, when Daniel walked into school, he wasn’t afraid of the bullies anymore. Being himself online meant his friends were on his side when things got rough.

Another set of tools can play an invaluable role in keeping our kids safe online: parental controls and privacy settings. Most sites have privacy controls, and it’s our responsibility as parents to familiarize ourselves with them, so we can help our children use them properly. Don’t be afraid to set up parental controls on your Internet browser or put limits on the sites your kids are looking at. It is, after all, still your computer! Feel free to define an acceptable list of websites your kids can visit, or at the very least a list of websites they need to avoid.

If you want your kids to get the maximum benefits out of controlled risks, they need the risks as well as the controls. Your default attitude toward Internet browsing should be toward openness.

At the same time, you need to stay on top of the latest fads and phenomena, so you can make informed choices about what’s safe for your kids. As parents, you have a responsibility to know what’s going on, and it pays to keep an open dialogue with your kids, to read the tech blogs occasionally, to check your kids’ Internet history, and to share knowledge with other parents. Don’t let your kids keep you in the dark. And when new websites or apps crop up that “all the cool kids are using,” have a discussion with your child about how to use them safely and wisely, before you give the okay.

Giving your child his or her own cell phone or computer is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity. Many people ask me when it’s appropriate for a child to have a cell phone, and I usually respond with somewhere between the second and sixth grades. It’s different for every family, but once you have play dates, after-school activities, and extended periods of separation, these devices become tools for ensuring safety, essential for both you and your child.

It’s also incredibly important that we teach our kids how to effectively configure their privacy controls online and to make use of reporting functions, so if they get into trouble online they can get help from administrators or other trusted authority figures. You want to make sure that your kids know how to share content with the right groups of people and to keep strangers out, just as they would in their offline lives. Of course, understanding the value of authentic identity, and spending time mostly on services that are based on this concept, will eliminate some of these problems.

We also need to give our children, especially teenagers, some credit and not project our own tech insecurities onto them. In many focus groups we conducted at Facebook, we found that teenagers were actually far more savvy about utilizing privacy settings than one would think. A study by the TRUSTe privacy management company recently showed that about 70 percent of teens know how to effectively configure their privacy settings on social networking sites, which is more than the number of parents who know how to do it.

It’s funny. When kids are young, we constantly tell them to share. Share your toys, share your games, share your snacks. But the second we turn to the digital world, our instinct is to protect and close off.
Don’t share!
we cry. Don’t share photos, don’t share information, don’t share passwords. The very nature of sharing has become complicated and muddled.

At the end of the day, parenting your kids online is really just parenting, period. There’s no one formula or correct solution to all our problems. But learning about the risks, rewards, and challenges technology creates in the lives of our children and families will ensure that they are equipped to come of age in the digital world.

The Internet can be a highly valuable place for kids. It doesn’t have to be scary, and we shouldn’t try to keep our kids offline. Start a conversation with your kids about safety, and make sure it’s an ongoing dialogue. You can always find the dark side of anything if you look for it. Let’s remember to stay focused on the light.

chapter 8

CAREER

A Life More Authentic

I
t was a freezing cold Friday night in Davos, Switzerland. As I struggled to take off my UGG boots and walk through yet another metal detector, I grumbled and, for a moment, wished I was back in California with Brent.
Keep going,
I thought. I was far from home, but this was not an experience to pass up.

In January 2010 I was invited to represent Facebook at the World Economic Forum in Davos, which is an annual event that gathers heads of state, CEOs, celebrities, academics, and the media to discuss innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems.

The forum hosts a Friday night Shabbat dinner, which is the traditional meal that begins the Jewish Sabbath. I’m very proud of my heritage and was honored to be invited this year. Plus, I could finally tell my mom I found a place to go for Shabbat.

The dinner took place in a small room at a hotel just outside the conference center. As I walked in and looked around, I was quickly overwhelmed. All around me were famous and important figures from the Jewish world. Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and humanitarian was there, along with Shimon Peres, president of Israel and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Gary and Laura Lauder of Estée Lauder, the head rabbi of Moscow, the under-secretary of state to Hillary Clinton, and so on. The number of accomplished and influential people in the room that night was mind numbing.

I was a little nervous but soon put at ease. Despite the impressive company sitting around the tables, it was really just a regular Shabbat dinner—intimate, humble, and welcoming.

As I was settling into my seat next to Julius Genachowski, chairman of the FCC and a leading voice in the promotion of net neutrality, and getting to know my other equally impressive tablemates, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up and saw Yossi Vardi, one of the world’s most beloved Israelis and a connector of all things tech, Israel, and Jewish.

“Randi,” Yossi said. “Elie Wiesel usually does the opening song for the Shabbat dinner, but he isn’t feeling well tonight and would prefer not to.”

Go on . . .
I thought.

Yossi continued, “Will you sing for us, ‘Yerushalayim shel Zahav’?”

I paused for a moment to take in what Yossi had just said. “Yerushalayim shel Zahav,” which means “Jerusalem of Gold,” is a popular Israeli folk song and a tribute to the beauty of the country. I thought back to the times in high school when I had sobbed my way through
Night,
Elie Wiesel’s book about his survival in Auschwitz. I had never thought I would even meet someone like Elie Wiesel, let alone sing for him. And to stand in front of the president of Israel, as a young Jewish woman, and sing about Israel was a tremendous honor.

“Yes,” I said confidently. “I’d love to.” And a moment later, confidence gave way to panic, when I realized I didn’t really know the lyrics. Minor detail.

I called Brent. He answered the phone, groggily awakening from a deep sleep. It was the middle of the night in California. “Brent!” I said. “I need you to text me the lyrics to ‘Yerushalayim shel Zahav.’ No time to explain.”

Within a few moments, the lyrics were on my BlackBerry. I quickly leaned over to the FCC chairman sitting next to me, handed him my flip camera, and said, “Here. Please record this, or my mom will totally kill me.”

I soon found myself standing next to President Peres, who introduced me to the room.

“In San Francisco,” he began, “there is a young Jewish boy by the name of Mark Zuckerberg. He runs a big company called Facebook that today I think is worth $100 million, or something very modest. Tonight his sister is here, but she’s not Facebooking. She’s singing, and she’s going to sing for us.”

I babbled about how excited I was to be there, looked down at the lyrics on my BlackBerry, smiled at how lucky I was to have such an amazing husband, took a deep breath, and began to sing.

“Avir harim tsalul k’yayin, vereiyach oranim,

Nissah beru’ach ha’arbayim, im kol pa’amonim.”

(The mountain air is clear as wine, and the scent of pines is carried on the evening wind with the sound of bells.)

“U’vtardemat ilan va’even, shvuyah bachalomah

Ha’ir asher badad yoshevet, u’velibah—chomah.”

(And the sleeping tree and stone is captured in her dream. The city that sits alone, and at its heart—a wall.)

The room was silent. I took a breath and asked everyone to join in on the chorus. In a beat, the room filled with voices, all singing:

“Yerushalayim shel zahav, v’shel nechoshet v’shel or

Ha lo lechol shirayich, Ani kinor.”

(Jerusalem of gold, bronze and light, behold, for all your songs, I am a harp.)

As I finished singing, I paused to look around the room, holding back beams of pride, for myself and for Israel and the Jewish people. I could practically hear my mother kvelling all the way back in Dobbs Ferry.

I walked back to my seat, half glowing, half trembling with nerves. After a moment, I excused myself from the table, called Brent, and broke down in tears. Words fail to describe how I felt, standing before some of the people who had made the State of Israel possible and, three generations later, singing about Israel to them.

Later that night, I posted the video on Facebook (all credit goes to Chairman Genachowski—he tapes a mean video!) along with a note about how, as a young Jewish woman, this was one of the most meaningful things that had ever happened to me. It was an important moment in my life, and I wanted to share it.

Within minutes, comments and messages were pouring in, publicly and privately. I got messages from people telling me how moved they were by the moment. Some people shared stories of their own past Shabbats. Others asked personal questions about my Jewish heritage and reflected on the difficulties of staying in touch with their own. People I had never met before commented on how inspiring it was that I was willing to stand up proudly before a room and celebrate my culture, my heritage.

I was so grateful for all the messages I received. I felt connected on a scale that I’ve rarely felt, and not just with friends and family but an entire community. I felt warm and loved.

But others had a very different reaction. Privately, I received a number of messages from friends and mentors I respected telling me that I shouldn’t have done that at all. It wasn’t professional, particularly for a woman executive, to put myself out there like that and to sing in public. And to sing on touchy subjects like Israel or religion was just too risky.

I didn’t feel the need to defend myself at the time, but later I spent a lot of time wondering if I had screwed up. On one hand, I’m proud of my Jewish heritage. It is an essential part of who I am. But I was at Davos to represent Facebook. If my singing reflected poorly on the company or me, then maybe it was a mistake.

Also, it felt as if it wasn’t just the fact that I sang that had raised some eyebrows. People wondered why I had to record it and post it online. Maybe it would have been okay to sing if I had just kept it to myself?

I was conflicted. That moment was one of the most important of my life, and my Facebook profile is a reflection of who I am. How could I not post the video? Something was all wrong in the land of the Internet.

In 2011, I went back to Davos, this time pregnant with Asher. For months leading up to the conference, I hoped I would be asked to sing again, but I was wracked with nerves about what I would say when asked. When they did ask, as desperately as I wanted to say yes, I decided to stay focused on my career and I declined, citing my pregnancy as an excuse. They were very gracious, and were even worried about me, but I felt hollow and sad, as if I had compromised my authentic self for my professional identity.

I resolved then to be true to myself both online and offline, in private and in public. And that might demand a shift in attitudes and preconceptions about what a “professional” is, but this is something we all have to do. Because that’s when you get to really belt your heart out.

The 360-Degree Professional

This philosophy was put to the test when I had Asher. Even though I promised myself many times over that when my son was born I wouldn’t become “that mom” on Facebook, I fell hard off the wagon and committed the typical new-mom-on-Facebook crime of documenting and posting every waking second of my new baby’s life. First yawn? Adorbs. Facebook it. First hiccups? Obviously all my friends want to see that. First spit-up? Share. Snoozing in a crib? Snoozing in a stroller? Snoozing in a park? OMG, soooo cute! Who wouldn’t want to see baby photos fifty times a day?

Well, I soon found out.

I had some pretty honest coworkers, and one day one of them decided to give it to me straight and called me on the phone to say, “Randi. Asher is adorable, but you’ve gone off the deep end. You can’t keep posting a zillion baby photos. You have a professional reputation to uphold as well. Do you really need to post about every single motherhood moment on Facebook?” We laughed about it, and the conversation was soon over. But when I hung up the phone, I felt horrible again.

By posting those baby photos, I was being true to where I was in my life. My days were entirely consumed by Asher, at the time, and it didn’t seem unreasonable that my Facebook Timeline would reflect that. I was being completely authentic online and much more than I had been in a while.

What if uploading photos of my son was compromising my professional “brand”? Would it really damage how colleagues and business partners on my Facebook friends list viewed me? Or was my online profile supposed to be a sterile, “professional” version of myself, in which I only showed brief glimpses of my life outside of work? And if the solution to these challenges was to share less, did that mean I should stop being authentic or try to be less authentic? If less, how much less? Twenty-five percent less? Fifty percent?

Ultimately, after a few days of thinking about it, I decided it was okay to blend my personal and professional life online. I am now convinced that the people who think we need to create a purely professional, one-dimensional brand online have got it totally wrong.

Hear me out.

Today, the people who work with me or do business with me get to read my newsletters about the future of the entertainment and technology industries, see the latest behind-the-scenes photos from the Zuckerberg Media studios, and watch the various interviews and media appearances I do every week. But they also know that I love my son and that I love to post lots of photos of him. They know that I love to travel. And they know that I sing in a cover band called Feedbomb (the illustrious successor to Evanescence Essence).

If before I could be professional Randi at work, motherly Randi at home, and social Randi around my friends, now I have to be all-of-the-above Randi. In the era of smartphones, social media, and authentic identity online, it’s no longer possible to separate your personal and professional identities. It doesn’t matter if I use LinkedIn for my business self and Facebook for my social self and CafeMom for my mommy self. If someone wants to track down any of these identities, all they need are some basic Googling skills and everything could be revealed.

Right now, there are two generations in the workforce who think in diametrically opposite ways about identity. Executives who came of age in the pre-smartphone era take it as a given that you should have a separate professional persona that reads like a profile in
Forbes
and doesn’t overlap with your personal persona. But my generation came of age in a world with social networks, and we know that we don’t have that luxury anymore. We understand that the business leaders of the future will be three-dimensional personalities, whose lives, interests, hobbies, and passions outside of work are documented and on display.

Instead of trying to maintain one narrow, unrepresentative version of our professional selves for our colleagues, the best leaders will have 360-degree identities, in which the personal and the professional will be combined seamlessly.

Do my colleagues, professional contacts, or online acquaintances think any less of me because they’ve seen more than just professional Randi? I hope not. We’re multidimensional, multifaceted people, all facing the same challenge of reconciling our personal and professional identities. We’re more than just our jobs. We’re more than workers or bosses. We’re mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, friends, spouses, singers, poets, politicians, foodies, and sports fans, all at the same time. We always have been. That’s what makes us so awesome.

So, we should embrace it. The answer isn’t fewer baby pictures; it’s more baby pictures. It’s not that I should post less; it’s that everyone else should post more.

If someone doesn’t want to do business with me because I post photos of my son or my band, well, then maybe they’re not the type of person I want to do business with either.