My children say ‘what’s an encyclopedia?’
EVER been met with blank looks when you’ve told someone under the age of 18 to look it up in an encyclopedia?
Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook and former vicepresident of Google, certainly has.
She tells today’s edition of Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 that her teenage son and daughter had no idea what one is or what it was for.
“I’ve tried to explain to my children what an encyclopedia is and that you wouldn’t have every question answered immediately – they don’t even understand it,” she says. Ms Sandberg also tells how she used Facebook to try to cope with the grief she felt at losing her husband Dave Goldberg in May 2015, following a heart arrhythmia while the couple were on holiday in Mexico.
She says: “I felt so isolated and so alone that I decided to write what I would write as a Facebook post if I were going to be honest about how I felt to the world. I wrote it for myself, I thought it’s not going to get worse and maybe it might get better and so I hit ‘post’ and I was shocked about how widely it was read. But it actually really helped. It didn’t bring Dave back and it didn’t take away the grief but it took away the feeling that I was alone because people started talking to me again.”
Ms Sandberg, who lives in Menlo Park, California, also defends the use of encrypted messages on the Whatsapp app, which is owned by Facebook, saying it is a “complicated conversation”.
She says: “We want to make sure all of us do our part to stop terrorism and so our Facebook polices are very clear – there’s absolutely no place [for] terrorism, hate, violence of any kind.”
Desert Island Discs is on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday at 11.15am.