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LA STAMPA

The Zuckerberg Private Honeymoon Paradox

Why The Facebook Founder's Anonymous Roman Getaway With His New Bride Is Barely Worth A Tweet.

Mark Zuckerberg *likes the Sistine Chapel (Twitter)
Mark Zuckerberg *likes the Sistine Chapel (Twitter)
Gianluca Nicoletti

Mark Zuckerberg's honeymoon in Rome has quickly been added to the legend. The first evidence has been bouncing back on Twitter: it's a picture that could have been taken by or of anyone. The Facebook founder was captured at the Sistine Chapel next to his newly-married wife Priscilla Chan, sporting an ever casual t-shirt and jeans.

The ingenius digital hero here seems engaged in the most conventional honeymoon ever. The man who recognized them was stunned that the newlyweds did not have a police escort. It seemed impossible that a billionaire like him would travel without a security detail, especially here in Italy where any lowly member of parliament is followed by at least three well-armed bodyguards when out shopping at Ikea.

During his quick holiday in Rome, Zuckerberg confirmed that he continues to carry himself in the high aesthetics of low-profile, not much different than when he was a penniless student in Harvard. Who knows if someone told him that for 2,000 euros, he could have had a private, guided tour of the Michelangelo masterpieces.

And so it is that the biggest prophet of sharing one's private life with thousands of strangers enters, despite himself, through the back door of the media circuit, by way of a report on Facebook's biggest social network competitor: the more ascetic Twitter.

It looks even more ironic that the inventor of Facebook would be captured by a blurry picture of himself (and his wife) from behind, a sneaky snapshot taken with a smartphone, a circumstance that this time underlines a singularity. We could venture the hypothesis that all this could represent a strategy of anticipatory viral marketing. Yesterday, at the time when "the poor man's paparazzi" pictures were going viral, press agencies were reviving the news, with The New York Times as a source, that Zuckerberg was secretly tooling up to launch the Facebook Smartphone, to be be on the market within a year.

But maybe the only real thing is that Mark Zuckerberg, the man who annihiliated the concept of anonymity, can afford to travel totally incognito. The height of absurdity is that the God of Faces has a face that not many notice -- indeed, only one guy armed with a cell phone approached him. You can bet that if any low-ranking showgirl had taken the same Roman "love tour" with her new hunk of a husband, she would have been followed by professional photographers, and wound up on the front pages of newspapers and magazines...rather than uploaded for a passing tweet.

Read the original article in Italian

Photo – Twitter

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Society

What's Spoiling The Kids: The Big Tech v. Bad Parenting Debate

Without an extended family network, modern parents have sought to raise happy kids in a "hostile" world. It's a tall order, when youngsters absorb the fears (and devices) around them like a sponge.

Image of a kid wearing a blue striped sweater, using an ipad.

Children exposed to technology at a very young age are prominent today.

Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ — A 2021 report from the United States (the Youth Risk Behavior Survey) found that 42% of the country's high-school students persistently felt sad and 22% had thought about suicide. In other words, almost half of the country's young people are living in despair and a fifth of them have thought about killing themselves.

Such chilling figures are unprecedented in history. Many have suggested that this might be the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but sadly, we can see depression has deeper causes, and the pandemic merely illustrated its complexity.

I have written before on possible links between severe depression and the time young people spend on social media. But this is just one aspect of the problem. Today, young people suffer frequent and intense emotional crises, and not just for all the hours spent staring at a screen. Another, possibly more important cause may lie in changes to the family composition and authority patterns at home.

Firstly: Families today have fewer members, who communicate less among themselves.

Young people marry at a later age, have fewer children and many opt for personal projects and pets instead of having children. Families are more diverse and flexible. In many countries, the number of children per woman is close to or less than one (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong among others).

In Colombia, women have on average 1.9 children, compared to 7.6 in 1970. Worldwide, women aged 15 to 49 years have on average 2.4 children, or half the average figure for 1970. The changes are much more pronounced in cities and among middle and upper-income groups.

Of further concern today is the decline in communication time at home, notably between parents and children. This is difficult to quantify, but reasons may include fewer household members, pervasive use of screens, mothers going to work, microwave ovens that have eliminated family cooking and meals and, thanks to new technologies, an increase in time spent on work, even at home. Our society is addicted to work and devotes little time to minors.

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