Read Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives Online
Authors: Randi Zuckerberg
Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (8 page)
And change goes beyond just the political. The Internet is playing a meaningful role in creating jobs and improving economies. Today, even as the global economy remains fragile, the Internet is emerging as an indispensable force for growth, jobs, and opportunity, through both the rise of giant new web companies and the realization by the older existing companies that the Internet is essential to their businesses. In a 2011 McKinsey Global Institute report,
Internet Matters,
researchers found that for every job lost to the web, two more were created by the web. These figures are only going to increase as more people and services go online.
The economic benefits of connectivity aren’t confined to advanced economies. The World Bank’s
Maximizing Mobile
report in 2012 showed how potato farmers in India managed to increase their incomes by up to 19 percent by using mobile apps to support their businesses, and banana growers in Uganda by 36 percent.
When disaster or tragedy strikes, the Internet can help save lives, mobilize aid, reunite loved ones, and assist the most vulnerable members of society. After the Japanese earthquake in 2011, hundreds of thousands of people took to Facebook, Twitter, and Google to find missing friends and family, and billions of dollars in online donations poured in from around the world to relief organizations working on the ground.
The Internet allows, and encourages, information to travel faster and farther than ever before. That means positive information travels quickly. If I have a particularly great experience at a restaurant or vacation spot, I can recommend it to everyone in my network. It also means negative information travels just as quickly. If I have a terrible experience somewhere, all my friends will immediately know about that as well. Therefore, businesses need to double down on their customer-support efforts. A world where everyone is a media company is a world where businesses can no longer afford poor customer experiences.
I once overheard a major Hollywood film executive say, “Social media has ruined our ability to release bad movies. And we need to be able to release bad movies to stay in business.” It used to be the case that a really bad movie could still have a great opening weekend, because it would take word of mouth a few days to spread. But in the age of Facebook and Twitter, a movie can be dead in the box office just hours after it opens.
But just because we have a megaphone doesn’t mean we need to shout from it all the time. If we’re constantly crying “Wolf!” nobody will take us seriously. As a society, we need to accept the gift we’ve been given and realize that it comes with a set of responsibilities. When used thoughtfully and mindfully, we can expand access to knowledge and information, demolish old barriers to understanding, and give a global voice to those who were once voiceless.
In the next decade, another three billion people will go online, mostly on mobile phones. In our homes, physical objects, such as recipes, photo prints, and receipts stuffed in drawers, will all be replaced by apps. Our doors, alarms, lights, thermostats, closets—all will be controlled with the touch of a button. On the road, cars will become platforms in and of themselves, acting as our travel guides, our virtual assistants, and eventually, with self-driving cars, even our drivers. We’ll be able to monitor our health daily, through wearable health devices and smart clothing. How we consume content, how we educate our children, how we view our possessions—everything is changing at a breakneck speed.
Once upon a time, all this was science fiction. Now it’s science fact.
I
t’s exhausting to put on an act—to be somebody in one situation and somebody else in another. Others may advise you to change who you are, to pretend to be someone else to get ahead, to “play the game.” But unless you’re committed to putting on an act all the time, it can be difficult to keep track of who you are in each situation and who knows you in what capacity.
Being authentic means you might not win a popularity contest anytime soon or be best friends with everybody. But, personally, I’ve always found it easier to sleep at night when I was true to myself that day.
Luckily, the Internet is beginning to catch up. Over the past decade, we’ve seen a shift from people using anonymous screen names online to more often using their real names, their real identities. This change in behavior, and the increased comfort with putting more information about ourselves online, has helped drive a great deal of innovation and change.
Remember your first, probably embarrassing, e-mail address or AOL Instant Messenger screen name? I do. Mine was Peggy42st, which I picked because I had just played the part of Peggy in my high school’s production of the musical
42nd Street
.
I remember having a whole discussion with my mom, right after I was accepted into Harvard University, during which she assured me that people would be normal and not stuck up or full of themselves. Immediately after that conversation, a future classmate tried to strike up a conversation with me on AIM. His screen name? igot1600.
So much for your theory, Mom.
Remember the effort you’d make to choose the perfect IM profile picture, or the time you invested in crafting the perfect “away” message? I admit that I spent way too much time selecting vague but meaningful lyrics from the latest song I was obsessed with. Plenty of times I would announce my presence online with “I believe I can fly,” “I saw the sign,” or “I get knocked down.”
But, look. I’ll come clean. And this may be hard to believe, but I wasn’t
really
Peggy from
42nd Street
. I was Randi from Dobbs Ferry. I could
call
myself Peggy online, but I wasn’t Peggy. In the early social web, that didn’t matter. My friends knew Peggy was Randi and didn’t get too confused about the whole thing.
But it would be weird if I had a profile of Peggy as my Facebook profile or used igot1600 as my screen name today. That’s not just because the SATs are no longer out of 1600 or because I’ve grown up. It’s because the Internet has grown up too.
Back when the web was mostly about accessing information, we experienced the Internet by typing keywords into search boxes, looking for just the right bright blue link to get us the latest news, celebrity gossip, movie listings, maps, and school research. Search engines offered us answers at the push of a button.
In the past decade, the Internet has grown beyond just finding information to connecting with
people
. Now we can benefit from the wisdom of our friends.
I remember the exact moment, on a Virgin America flight between San Francisco and New York City, that my friend gave me a stern talk about how I should change my Twitter handle from @randijayne to @randizuckerberg so that people would be able to find me.
When we use our real names and identities online, we can easily find and connect with friends, family, and colleagues no matter where we travel in life. We can show ourselves to prospective employers as the people we really are, with our résumés and career histories on display to the world, allowing us to find new opportunities and livelihoods. We can interact with businesses as more than just random website visitors and benefit from products, offers, and services that are more personalized, relevant, and useful. Smart advertising systems that better understand our interests and personal information can suggest things we might actually want to buy or even allow us to just have fun, like serving up ads for dude ranches when we title our e-mails “Dude” in Gmail.
I’m often asked to talk about Facebook’s early success, how it was able to gain so much momentum so quickly. Of course, most of this was due to the excellence of the site and the product itself, but I think a big part of Facebook’s early success was due to people using their real names on the site.
Right from the beginning, there was a culture on Facebook of this. While it was definitely not the norm on other social networking sites at the time, such as MySpace or Friendster, people on Facebook felt comfortable using their real first and last names because they had to be authenticated using a .edu e-mail address, which meant that the only people who could see them on the site were the same people they would run into in class, in the dorms, or at parties on campus anyway. This established a level of trust early on and meant that the connections formed on Facebook were more valuable and more authentic than on other sites. More important, it meant that people tended to behave thoughtfully and truthfully. People were much less likely to be nasty or make up blatant lies about themselves, when they could be easily called out on it.
On a grander scale, when we speak as ourselves online, our voices carry further, with greater authority. All those amazing examples of online movements that have created massive social change were only made possible because courageous individuals inspired others to action by taking a stand as themselves. Identity can be more than just consuming inspiring quotes or cute photos from a friend. It can mean the difference between simply believing in an idea or a cause and standing in the way of tanks.
In a world where we are the same people online and offline, we’ll know more about the people, celebrities, politicians, and, really, everyone we interact with.
I’m a passionate believer in the power of authentic identity. So, I’ve been quoted as saying that anonymity on the Internet had to go away, as a way of unlocking all the great benefits of an authentic web. I also think it will help in the fight against online bullying. It seems obvious to me that people tend to behave better, and abuse others less, when their behavior online is out in the open for all to see, attached to their real names and a picture of their faces.
That’s not to say there’s no more room for witty-and-weird or anything-goes online screen names, or that no meaningful relationships can arise from online interaction via avatars. In some communities and countries, or when discussing certain extremely sensitive topics, the cloak of anonymity can be necessary simply for personal safety and privacy. Activists and campaigners who are working for change in societies around the world may need to organize and meet in secret online. People asking questions about their health, or asking questions as victims of a crime, may not want to do so under their real names. But these are the exceptions to the rule. Just as there are perfectly good reasons why we expect people to use the same, real names in their daily lives, the Internet will be a better place when everyone consistently uses their real names.
And as the Internet becomes defined by our authentic selves, who you are online will reflect more of who you are offline. Today, it’s becoming hard to say you actually went anywhere or did anything if you don’t have the photos or the location check-ins to prove it. “Pics or it didn’t happen,” as the saying goes.
We are both the artists and the curators of our online one-person shows. Our digital selves are quickly becoming reflections of our actual selves. In a 2013 Cambridge University study that analyzed the Facebook profile data of about fifty-nine thousand Americans, researchers discovered that, based on likes alone, they could accurately predict a person’s gender and ethnicity 95 percent of the time, whether a person was a Republican or Democrat 85 percent of the time, whether a person was Christian or Muslim 82 percent of the time, and even whether that person’s parents divorced before he or she was age twenty-one about 60 percent of the time.
Authentic identity is what enables Florence Detlor, a 101-year-old grandmother in Menlo Park and one of the world’s oldest Facebook users, to stay up to date with the lives of her grandchildren, friends, and family.
It’s what enabled Aaron Durand, a Twitter user from Portland, Oregon, to save his mother’s independent bookstore from going out of business. When he posted a single tweet asking for help, promising to buy a burrito for anyone who bought more than fifty dollars worth of books, the message ended up being shared by hundreds of people. His offer drove so many new customers to the store that it became profitable and managed to stay open.
And authentic identity is what reunited João Crisóstomo, a sixty-eight-year-old New Yorker, with his long-lost friend Vilma Kracun. João had known her while working as a waiter in London in the 1970s, but after he moved to Brazil and then New York, he lost touch with her. Four decades later, on Valentine’s Day in 2011, he received a phone call from a mutual acquaintance: Vilma had been found on Facebook. They soon made plans to meet in Paris, fell in love, and were married in April 2012.
Of course, all change comes with growing pains. Online identity can be a challenge to manage, especially when you are using many different social networking sites, banking sites, dating sites, job-search sites, and more. Entire industries have popped up to help people store and manage their online accounts and improve their online reputation, and to help websites show up higher in Google search results.
And then there’s the issue of privacy. While the positives of being your real self online far outweigh the negatives, it’s always scary to open up more of yourself online. But before we scream bloody murder, we have to collectively take a deep breath and try to figure out if we’re uncomfortable with something because it’s truly bad or because it’s new and we are resistant to change.
One example I like to reference is the introduction of caller ID on our phones. When caller ID was first introduced, people were up in arms. How dare our privacy be invaded! How dare other people be able to see that we are the ones calling them! But now think about a world without caller ID. I don’t know about you, but when I get a call from a number I don’t already have programmed into my phone, I usually let it go straight to voice mail. Caller ID has been a tremendous net benefit. Often change, even though it feels uncomfortable at first, can be for the better.
So, let’s embrace being our real selves all the time. It’s exhausting to try to be someone different in different situations. When we’re authentic online, we can connect with others as we really are, and vice versa.
Welcome to the Gray Zone
Of course, for all its amazing benefits, the Internet can get you into lots of trouble. That’s the thing about this “sufficiently advanced” technology. It may be magic, but we’re not magicians.
In the early days of Facebook, mostly everything we did on the site was modeled after some parallel thing that existed in colleges around the country. There were features within the profile for listing your classes and your spring break plans; even the “wall” (now part of the Timeline) back then was more of a whiteboard, with the capability of displaying only one message at a time. By the same token, instead of ads on the site, Facebook had “flyers.”
One night, working late on a PowerPoint deck for the marketing department, I needed a picture of a flyer live on the site. A colleague and I quickly drafted a convincing flyer for a fake rush party at a Stanford sorority the following day (we used the name of an actual sorority she had heard about through a friend), posted it to the network, and took a screenshot. With my presentation complete, I shut down my computer and went home to crash. I was exhausted from the long night of work.
The next morning, I awoke with a horrifying realization. I had forgotten to take the flyer down.
Sh*$%!
Of course, we immediately took down the post, but it was too late. Sorority pledges had begun to gather, searching for a pledge party that didn’t exist. More and more of them came, by the dozens. Moreover, it was midterms week on campus, during which time sororities and fraternities are banned from holding formal events. The accidental flash mob dispersed only when a bullhorn-shouting security guard insisted, “No party. No party!”
The sisters of Kappa Kappa Something were pretty unhappy with Facebook after that. It was my task to clear things up with the administrative office before the sorority was banned from campus. As a valiant gesture, one of our engineers kindly offered to host a sleepover at Facebook for all the girls, “to make it up to them.” Somehow, I didn’t think that was such a good idea. But we managed to square things with everyone in the end.
I learned a couple of valuable lessons that day. For one, Facebook ads clearly worked. More important, it was a huge aha moment for me. Until then, I hadn’t witnessed firsthand the incredible impact a simple online action could have in mobilizing people offline. One click of a button might seem minor, but in reality, it could be extremely powerful. In some ways, I credit that experience for guiding my thinking in many of the projects I went on to lead, involving politics, nonprofits, and pop culture. In this new era of social media, when everything is broadcast to the world, even simple messages can have potentially far-reaching consequences.