Liz Bury 

Randi Zuckerberg warns of social media’s risks in two new books

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's sister suggests adults and children should limit time online
  
  

Randi Zuckerberg
Randi Zuckerberg, when marketing director of Facebook, at the Digital Life Design (DLD) conference in 2011 in Munich. Photograph: Miguel Villagran/Getty Images Photograph: Miguel Villagran/Getty Images

She helped to create one of the world's largest social networks, but now Randi Zuckerberg, the older sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, has written two books which suggest that adults and children should consider limiting their use of social media.

Zuckerberg worked at Facebook during its formative period and as marketing director there for six years until 2011. The first book, a cross between memoir and how-to guide, Dot Complicated shares its name with a newsletter which Zuckerberg started after repeatedly being asked for tips about how to use social media from audience members at her speaking gigs.

Subtitled "How to make it through life online in one piece", the book draws on her own experiences on the frontline of social media to address the complications of a socially transparent world, including issues of privacy, social identity, authenticity, crowd-sourcing and how these will affect society in the future.

Her second book, Dot, is a story for children illustrated by Joe Berger, about a young girl called Dot who discovers the fun of playing outside when her mother takes away her tablet, laptop, cellphone, and desktop computer. "Dot is a spunky little girl, obsessed with electronic devices. Dot knows a lot. She knows how to tap … to swipe … to share … online, but she pays little attention to anything else," runs the book blurb.

Both books advocate occasionally switching off connections to social media. While writing the book in Tokyo this year, Zuckerberg did without a roaming data package for her phone. "Gradually, over the course of a month, I loved being unreachable. I saw that the world didn't end if I waited to respond to an email in six hours, rather than six minutes," she told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Zuckerberg famously shared pictures of her baby son with colleagues on Facebook, which the company uses for its own internal communications, even after she was asked to stop. In a blogpost for Time magazine, she claimed that the experience led her to the conclusion that "the people who think we need to create a purely professional, one-dimensional brand online have got it totally wrong".

Dot Complicated is written in what the New York Times described as "Facebook style": every idea and opportunity is "awesome," "amazing" or "incredible"; it all blows her mind or blows her away, and we hear a great deal about how much she loves her husband and how adorable their baby is".

Both of Zuckerberg's books are published in the UK by Penguin Random House on 7 November.

 

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