A tech industry veteran offers guidance for integrating tech into our lives without letting it take over our lives. Excerpted from “Untangling Our Wired Lives,” December 10, 2013.

RANDI ZUCKERBERG, Former Marketing Director, Facebook; Author, Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives

 

KARA SWISHER: Let’s talk about the lightning rod of what you’re doing here. I read a lot of the reviews last night and they’re very personal. Let’s talk first about the kid book. You had [children’s singer] Raffi attack you.

RANDI ZUCKERBERG: The children’s book is about a young girl named Dot who is just obsessed with her tech devices and gadgets and over the course of the book learns to put them down and go play outside.

Does everyone know who Raffi, the children’s singer is? Before you “woo” at that, he turned out to be a Twitter troll and an Amazon troll. I saw him on Twitter trying to mobilize people to give Dot a one-star review.

SWISHER: What he was saying was that the kid had the iPad and was using it unfettered and without parents watching. The second one was that you were comparing outdoors to a lot of online activities. At the end of the book, she ends up back in love with her iPad. I think the concept was that you were promoting the idea of children using videogames and iPads and cell phones and not having a parent saying, “This is not a good thing to do.”

ZUCKERBERG: The book, for those of you who wind up taking a look at it, in the beginning of the book, it’s only in one color. Dot’s alone. She’s ignoring her dog. She’s ignoring her friends and she tweets and taps and swipes.

SWISHER: And she’s six. That was one of the other issues.

ZUCKERBERG: I think she’s 11 or 12, but apparently Raffi is the expert, so she’s six.

Then in the second half of the book she goes outside and suddenly the book is in full color. She’s with her friends swiping. She’s making a finger mural on the iPad. She’s tapping, she’s dancing. The original draft of the book ended on a picture of her and her friends holding hands – no technology.

I was having a lot of trouble sleeping at night knowing that that was the closing image, because my message is not that children should not have technology. That’s not my message. In fact, I believe very strongly that children need digital literacy in this world. Also, that train has left the station. Try prying a phone or a game or a tablet out of a child’s hand. Even at two years old, I see my son and how much he loves his technology. It seemed to me that that was just an unrealistic ending to the book and not one that I advocate, because I think there is a lot of creative interactivity that comes out of these devices.

So the new ending that we came up with is that she is with her friends, they are using tech, but they’re using it to get closer to one another.

SWISHER: They’re basically SnapChatting at that point.

ZUCKERBERG: Yeah, they’re doing that. But she’s using it in a social setting, so the point is not that tech keeps you further from your friends; it’s that it can actually bring you closer to them.

SWISHER: Now, in this book were you trying to be the Miss Manners of the Internet? What was the point of doing this? You got [complaints like], “Who does she think she is? Why is she telling us about netiquette?” Why did you do the book?

ZUCKERBERG: I just wanted to tell my own story. After I left Facebook, I had a lot of opportunities to do public speaking for a lot of businesses and conferences. The thing I noticed was that they would always ask me to come up on stage and talk about Facebook and business. Then people would queue up after I got off stage, and all the questions in the private queue were like, “What’s my child doing on Instagram?” and “Why is my husband using his iPad in bed?”

I just decided, I’m going to start this blog with all of these common questions that I get asked around the world because no matter where I went they were the same. It’s just my viewpoint on these issues. I’m not calling myself an expert. It’s just my own story, my own viewpoint.

SWISHER: Talk about some things you think are important in the book. Oversharing was one thing. You had a discussion about how a friend of yours told you offline that you had put too many of your kids’ pictures up, like a baby oversharer. Then you thought about it and then you decided, “I think I’ll share some more. So what. I don’t care. This is who I am.”

ZUCKERBERG: I swore up and down that I wasn’t going to be that mom when I had my baby. I was like, “I’m so cool. I have my own life. I’m not going to be that mom that shares a million baby photos.” Then I had my baby and it was like something just kicked in my brain and all of a sudden all I could think to do was share baby photos. That was it. It just all changed.

A good friend told me, “Hey not everyone who you’re connected to on Facebook wants to see a million photos of your baby.” Which made me start thinking, Gosh, we don’t have the luxury anymore of having a professional life and a private life.

Used to be you could be someone at work and then you could come home and be a mom at home, and that’s what you had. Now today, you have one identity online. If someone types your name into the Internet, there’s just one identity that’s there. It’s forcing us all to really think about what is our 360 identity. Do we want to be more authentic? Am I posting too many baby photos? Are my personal and professional identities the same?

For me, I’ve chosen to just be myself, to adopt an authentic identity.

SWISHER: Talk about how you created Dot Complicated.

ZUCKERBERG: Dot Complicated really formed because of all of these speeches I was giving and all of the common questions that I got. I figured, gosh, if this woman in Oman and this business person in Oklahoma are asking me the same questions, surely there are a lot of people out there who are asking these questions. I have just one viewpoint, just one answer, but it’s my blog.

SWISHER: Did you want to be a cheerleader there in a lot of ways, or do you feel like you’re too much of a cheerleader? Because there are things to worry about. It’s not dangerous. There are a lot of companies, including Facebook, including Google, that take your privacy. You give it up willingly, definitely people do; but the knowledge base is not so strong for quite a lot of people so they don’t quite understand what’s happening and that it’s all for advertising.

ZUCKERBERG: We definitely try to take a very balanced approach on the blog. I bring a lot of guest writers. If someone has something negative to say about Facebook, I don’t censor them just because it’s my blog. We try to present a very balanced viewpoint. But the point of view that I’ve taken is that there’s no fearmongering that happens on Dot Complicated. This is something that’s happening in our society whether we like it or not, so we’re going to choose to find the opportunity and the meaning in it rather than just continually harp on it ruining our lives and on the good old days before we had tech.

SWISHER: Will we ever see complete forgiveness for what we share on the Internet? If not, what should we never share?

ZUCKERBERG: We’re sort of in this grey zone right now. I think if you go 10, 20 years in the future, every business leader, every celebrity, every politician is going to have said something awful online that they really regretted and wish they could take back. It’s just going to be a matter of society that that’s happened. Unfortunately, we live in this grey zone right now where there are still a lot of people who don’t feel like that’s OK and the millennial generation coming into the workforce who do feel like that’s OK.

SWISHER: How do you see technology effectively connecting and bonding people? Do you have a vision of how this can be better or worse over the next 20 years?

ZUCKERBERG: I absolutely think that tech is net positive in bringing people together. In my life, especially as a working mom, it’s essential. It’s bought me so much freedom, so much opportunity to both stay connected to my family and pursue everything that I love in my career and travel. It’s very overwhelming now that people can reach you through 18 different angles. They can reach you on text message, they can reach you through the phone, they can reach you on Facebook and Twitter and all of these boxes. It’s almost like we don’t give ourselves any time to be creative anymore, to think out of the box because we’re constantly in a state of interruption, disruption. How can any of us be expected to come up with that next big idea or invest in ourselves or our relationships or our creativity when you’re constantly distracted by that?

SWISHER [Reading audience question card]: There is quite a lot of scientific evidence that electromagnetic radiation from cell phone towers, Wi-Fi, iPads, laptops is harmful to our health, causing ADHD, all kinds of issues, and especially harm to children and the elderly. Please comment on this.

ZUCKERBERG: They are treating youngsters as young as four years old in parts of the world for tech addiction. There is actually dopamine that’s released in your brain when you get an email, a text message, that makes it addictive to check. So much to the point that now, with text messaging and driving such a real issue, I can’t wait for the self-driving cars to come out so that they can save us from ourselves. There have been a lot of studies that have come out around texting and driving. Why do people do it? It’s six times as dangerous as drunk driving. Most adults know that it’s dangerous and they still do it. In fact, 30 percent of women driving with a child under age one in the car still text and drive.

When you ask people why they do it, they say, “It’s a habit. I can’t help it.” There really are real issues. I can’t comment on ADHD and medical things like that, but I do know there are real kind of addiction issues like that happening.

SWISHER: Give some tips that you think are important, things people have to pay attention to – people who aren’t so tech savvy and people who are. Give me five.

ZUCKERBERG: Paying attention to your reputation online is really key, especially because for the rest of your life the first thing someone’s going to do when they meet you is to type your name online, if they’re hiring you, if they’re dating you, anything like that. One thing I always counsel people is that you don’t have to have a presence on every site. Even just the notion of signing up for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, things like that, ensures that you have control over your first page of search results. That’s a really good thing to think about.

SWISHER: How do you grade yourself on that first one?

ZUCKERBERG: Everyone should have a Google search out on themselves just to see what’s being said. Though that’s going to be my second tip: Make sure you’re not buying into your own hype that much, because it’s very, very easy to get distracted by what people that you don’t know are saying or how they’re responding to you online. It’s very important to not get sucked into that.

SWISHER: Do you get sucked into it?

ZUCKERBERG: I used to get sucked into it, and now I don’t. One of the best pieces of advice my brother ever told me was, you’re never as good as people say you are; you’re never as bad as people say you are. Just stay true to what you believe about yourself.

Next is to be authentic online. It used to be that we had the luxury of a professional identity and a personal identity. Unfortunately we don’t have that luxury anymore. We can debate all day whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just the reality. I think we need to be very thoughtful about what we’re putting out there so that it’s reflective of who we want to be both professionally and personally.

SWISHER: Four?

ZUCKERBERG: Oversharing, we touched on that, especially around very young children. This is one I talk about a lot because your digital identity today begins before you’re even born. From that first sonogram photo that your parents share, from the first announcement, you’re creating a digital footprint for your child. A lot of parents only think about their own online identity when they share. They don’t think about the digital footprint that they’re creating for their children when they share.

Respecting your own boundaries online. So many of us – maybe we have a boss that emails us at midnight. Maybe we have a friend who text messages us and gets upset if they don’t get an immediate response. It’s really important to create your own boundaries and respect them, because if you respect your time, the people around you will start to learn to respect your time also.

Finally, take some time to unplug every day. I don’t know how any of us expect to be creative or to be our best selves if we don’t give [ourselves] the time to do that.