Read Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives Online
Authors: Randi Zuckerberg
I’m going to share some of my personal stories, my struggles, my triumphs, and my excruciating and frequently humbling experiences encountering the new world of technology. I’m going to talk about what life will be like for digital natives—like my child—in the years ahead and about the challenges for this first generation of parents, who have children growing up entirely online, with every single moment of their lives documented and recorded. And I’m going to talk about how we can use technology for all the things that are important to us.
S
ometime in late fall of 2012, I started to think a lot about technology and our modern lives: etiquette, relationships, identity, sharing. As I mentioned at the end of the previous chapter, I had just finished a yearlong speaking tour and was blown away at the number of personal questions people asked me about the role of tech and the changing communication in their lives—with their kids, their families, and their careers—no matter where I traveled or who was in the audience.
At about the same time, Bradley Lautenbach (my partner on the ABC News–Facebook debate back in 2008 and now my partner at our newly formed company, Zuckerberg Media) and I, along with Jeff Paik (our CFO), were weighing the pros and cons of a long slate of original content we wanted to create.
One day I was having a conversation with a woman about tech in the workplace when she suddenly started tearing up. She confided in me that she was going to lose her job to someone more tech savvy and asked for advice on how to get a better grasp on some of the latest tech.
That’s when it hit me. If this person standing before me felt so tearfully insecure about tech and her life and her career, surely there were millions of other people out there who felt the same way. Tech didn’t have to be overly confusing or complicated. When explained properly, in a relatable, approachable way, it can be amazing and life changing. I desperately wanted to help demystify tech and relieve people’s fears, and in some ways, I felt like it was my responsibility to do so, the karma I needed to return to the world.
Bradley and I got incredibly excited about our new vision. Because Bradley had been producing for
Good Morning America
at ABC, he had a deep understanding of the morning television audience and how to produce content that was informative, entertaining, and relatable.
We knew that outside the tech world we lived in, people didn’t really self-identify as “geeks” or “techies.” If you ask most women what kind of content they want to read about in a magazine or blog, few will say they want more about technology. However, those same women will click on articles about technology at surprisingly high rates. We also saw that most people were more tech savvy than they gave themselves credit for and were very interested in content that helped them navigate their everyday lives.
Because tech is now such an ingrained part of our lives, it’s really no longer “tech” content—it’s simply
modern living.
We saw that people were equal parts amazed and confused by technology. They loved downloading apps but were unsure how to monitor their children’s usage or even how to just talk to their kids about the popular apps of the moment. Those who knew how to text message sometimes didn’t know how to stop, even though they realized they were texting at times that might be deemed inappropriate. They loved sharing photos but often didn’t know how to navigate the privacy settings around all that sharing. The gray areas of society were getting bigger and grayer every single day. And every new innovation added a new shade of complication.
It suddenly became very clear to me what we needed to do next. I knew that I wanted to help people understand how tech could be an amazing force for good in their lives, when used mindfully and properly. So, we decided to launch a website called Dot Complicated. The mission would be “untangling our wired, wonderful lives.”
I cared deeply about the human side of tech. I had majored in psychology at Harvard and had been a longtime champion within Facebook of recognizing the
people
behind the computer code. I had spent the past six years working with people and companies to handle various issues related to tech and their lives. And I had acted as a spokesperson for Facebook in the media, when Facebook needed someone relatable and approachable to bridge the gap between tech and everyday life.
I guess, in some way, Dot Complicated had been a part of me all along. I suddenly felt renewed, invigorated. I felt like all the work I had done at Facebook—all the projects and innovations I had pioneered, all the mistakes I had made—had been leading up to this. It was time to address these issues around modern, digital living head-on.
With a newfound vision in place, Bradley and I decided to take off the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, so we could come back refreshed in the new year.
Part of being lucky means recognizing the signs that point out opportunity along the way. Even if those signs come hurtling at you in the form of an online uproar and public-shaming media spectacle at your own expense.
After all . . .
A successful woman is one who can build a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at her.
—modified from an original quote by David Brinkley
My family had gathered for dinner on Christmas 2012. My sister Donna is an amazing cook, and she was making Peking duck in honor of our family’s modern Jewish tradition of eating Chinese food on Christmas. We’re all so busy that it’s a real treat to get everyone together. This was one of those rare years when we all just happened to be in town for the holidays.
After an absolutely delicious meal, my husband, Brent, took our son, Asher, home to get him ready for bed while I stayed a bit longer with the rest of the family to help clean up. Everyone was gathered in the kitchen, clearing dishes and drinking coffee, while Mark demonstrated the brand-new Poke app that Facebook had launched earlier that week. Through the app, you could send someone a message that would vanish in ten seconds.
This message will self-destruct in ten, nine, eight . . .
I would have had a lot of fun with an app like that in college, and I could see why this trend of “ephemeral messaging” was so popular among teens and young adults.
By that point, we had all downloaded Poke so we could try it out firsthand. Looking around, I thought it was funny that here we were, standing around the kitchen counter, and rather than speaking to one another, everyone was looking down at their phones, frantically texting and sending one another vanishing messages on the Poke app.
“Say cheese!” I said, pulling out my camera. “Pretend you’re all sexting!” Everyone made funny pretend-horrified faces, and I snapped a quick photo.
I don’t often post intimate family photos online, because I am a firm believer that you can (and should!) have meaningful relationships with people that you don’t necessarily need to broadcast out to the world all the time. But this was an adorably tame, cute photo. So, I posted it to Facebook (under the friends-only privacy setting) and headed home to tuck my son into bed.
Of course, I knew there was a chance that picture would leak. I never post anything online that I wouldn’t feel comfortable having reprinted on the front page of a newspaper. And this photo was the turducken of tech photos: Facebook family, using Facebook, on Facebook.
But I thought, of all nights, surely Christmas was a night when everyone was enjoying their own families and could appreciate our family photo without going, “OMG! Look! A photo of Mark Zuckerberg being funny with his family! I immediately need to blog this.”
I had no idea what was in store for me.
About an hour later, my son was happily tucked into bed, and I was enjoying a mug of hot apple cider in my living room, just playing around online and procrastinating before going to bed. I took a quick glance at Twitter, and then did a double take. Someone had taken the family photo that I had posted on Facebook and posted it on Twitter. That meant that one of my Facebook friends had seen the photo pop up on Facebook, downloaded or taken a screenshot of the photo, saved it to his or her phone or computer, and then uploaded it to a totally different site. Because it was late at night, I was feeling a bit emotional from a nice evening with family. I fired off a response expressing my frustration.
Then I went to bed.
The next morning I woke up to what seemed like a national news scandal. I had dozens of text messages, several urgent missed calls from Bradley, and thousands of tweets. Every news station I flipped past was showing my family photo and talking about my Twitter exchange. Obviously, people were greatly enjoying the Schadenfreude of a Zuckerberg getting mixed up in anything that had to do with Facebook and privacy.
Gulp.
“Randi,” Bradley barked at me, as soon as I returned his calls. “
Good Morning America
has texted me three times already this morning, asking for a comment from you on privacy and etiquette. Oh, and congrats on giving the media something to talk about for the next three days, during the slowest ever news cycle possible.”
I just sat there amid a flood of incoming text messages from friends asking if I was okay, television producers calling me for interviews, anonymous people spewing venom at me on Twitter, Bradley asking me why he couldn’t just go away for three quiet days of holiday without me stirring up a controversy . . .
But all I could think about was how “dot complicated” this whole situation was.
The entire media world was abuzz over the headline “Zuckerberg’s Sister Caught Out by Facebook’s Privacy Settings,” but it really wasn’t about that at all. I understood my privacy settings completely. This was about the gray areas of sharing, social conduct, and online etiquette.
Ironically, the downloads of Facebook’s Poke app rose in the Apple store during the next few days. (See, I was still doing marketing for the company!)
More important, the whole incident made me even more passionate about starting a discussion about our modern, digital lives. Here I was, a living, breathing example of how tech could be a wonderful and amazing tool, but it could also get you into a lot of trouble. And I knew there were millions of people out there who could relate.
And with that, I dove headfirst into my new mission. I started doing regular segments for
The Today Show
on “modern tech dilemmas.” I was quoted in the
New York Times
in a front-page article about the new voices of online etiquette. I launched my own e-mail newsletter, also titled Dot Complicated, with articles on how tech can improve your career, your love life, your family life, your relationships, and more.
And I started writing this book.
To understand why I think identity, humanity, and etiquette are so crucial to our modern lives and our relationships with tech moving forward, I think it’s important to understand a bit about where we’ve come from.
The famous science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” He was right. New technology is a kind of magic, and today we can do things with ease that were impossible just a few years ago. Like magic, each new innovation has advanced our society and our potential. Of course, the seductive glow of these magical devices can also blind us to some of their downsides and side effects.
My journey began in the magical land of Dobbs Ferry, New York.
They were the glorious hypercolored-T-shirt-and-Umbro-shorts-wearing days of the early ’90s. I must have been nine or ten years old at the time. One day, after I returned home from school, my father called me into his dental office, which was located on the bottom floor of our home.
“I have a surprise for you,” he said.
I better not need a filling,
I thought.
I went down to the office, and there I discovered the surprise: a large beige box, on a little trolley with wheels, plugged into the wall. There were a couple of blinking lights on the side.
I was unimpressed. “So, what does it do?”
My father duly explained. “We can take a photo of you and put it into the machine, and then we can take another photo of someone else and swap your smiles. So, now when people come to see me they can choose the smile they want and know what it’ll look like.”
I was so excited that I insisted my father show me the machine right then and there. We ended up scanning and swapping my smile with my mom’s.
Of course, I couldn’t immediately share the picture with thousands of people, like we can today. My dad printed out a copy and I brought it to school, showing a few friends, but that was it. Then I promptly placed the image inside a shoebox of photos beneath my bed and forgot about it. If I could have shared it with thousands of people, would I have done so? Should I have done so? Luckily, things were less complicated back then. And besides, I looked pretty weird with someone else’s smile.
I was fascinated with that machine. I used to try to find ways to sneak down to the office when my friends were over and we would happily play a few rounds of smile swapping. Sometimes I would get caught and then I would get an earful. But it was totally worth it for a chance to play with magic.
In seventh grade, I got my first telephone. Because mobile phones weren’t yet prevalent, it still had a cord attached to it. And okay, it wasn’t even entirely mine. During the day, it was my father’s office line. But after the dental office closed for the day, I was free to claim the line. Now I could spend evenings and weekends talking with friends for hours! Obviously, we talked about all the important topics: boys, movies, Nirvana, and Ace of Base. Sometimes I’d also have unexpected conversations with people looking for some dental work. Those conversations were less interesting.
At about the same time, I had my first encounter with the Internet. Computers weren’t new in our house. For as long as I could remember, my dad had a couple of old machines in his office, an Atari from the 1970s and an IBM PC he’d bought at about the time I was born. I never really touched them; my father used them for storing patient records, doing office correspondence, and other serious stuff. But in the mid-1990s, my parents got a computer for my siblings and me to share.
That first computer was big, slow, and often difficult to use. Listening to the computer cringe and wail as it dialed up to the Internet was a tedious experience, one made even more tedious by getting disconnected every time someone in the house picked up the phone. But logging on to AOL for the very first time and being able to send e-mail, search Grolier’s online encyclopedia for school projects, or instant message with my friends was life changing.