An Experiment in Scotch

I am com­pletely unhip. This comes as no sur­prise to the two dear read­ers I have. I have never been what one might call an early adopter. I am an only child and thus, typ­i­cally averse to change and dis­or­der. There­fore, when I recently received mul­ti­ple invi­ta­tions to LinkedIn, I politely declined, par­tially out of habit but par­tially out of some sense of dis­taste with the whole idea of “This is what net­work­ing should be.”

Some­thing about the con­cept of being linked not only to my clos­est friends and/or col­leagues but also for­mer col­leagues from a com­pletely dif­fer­ent life struck me as odd. The extent of that odd­ness didn’t really hit home until I began reread­ing The Best Soft­ware Writ­ing I tonight in an attempt to get my groove back. Like much in life that seems coin­ci­den­tal but turns out to be serendip­ity, I picked danah boyd’s arti­cle enti­tled Autis­tic Social Soft­ware. As is my cus­tom, I found some­one else much smarter and more elo­quent that helped me put the odd­ness to words.

LinkedIn is the epit­ome of danah’s autis­tic social soft­ware, a tech­nol­ogy that sim­pli­fies rela­tion­ships to the point of silli­ness in an attempt to make it use­ful to peo­ple. The irony in LinkedIn’s vision, “Rela­tion­ships Mat­ter”, is not that they don’t but that LinkedIn is such a poor rep­re­sen­ta­tion of rela­tion­ships at a per­sonal level. Rela­tion­ships DO mat­ter and that’s why they are hard work, work that must be invested in peo­ple in order to make the rela­tion­ship worth­while. LinkedIn is an exten­sion of the tech­no­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­non where we expect hard things to be easy through the use of tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs. The prob­lem is, I would no more likely ask 98% of the peo­ple I would be linked to for a job than I would walk on the moon. It’s just not how our social psy­chol­ogy works.

LinkedIn makes “rela­tion­ships” easy by link­ing you to your friends and all their rela­tion­ships as well so that by sign­ing up and asso­ci­at­ing your­self on LinkedIn, you imme­di­ately become “related” to peo­ple you may very well have made a con­scious deci­sion to become unre­lated to in the past. I choose not to net­work with lots of peo­ple for a vari­ety of very good rea­sons. I want my net­work to be small, not large because we as humans can’t keep up with very many true rela­tion­ships at one time and I, as a closet intro­vert, can keep up with fewer than most people.

Of course, LinkedIn is use­ful for some­thing, oth­er­wise why would 15 mil­lion peo­ple be using it? As it turns out, if we return to danah’s paper, I think LinkedIn is being co-opted in the same way Friend­ster was being used back in 2004. Friend­ster was orig­i­nally planned as a dat­ing site but peo­ple started using it more just as a way to keep in touch with friends, rarely using the fea­tures as a dat­ing ser­vice. Peo­ple used the tech­nol­ogy for their own pur­poses, whether or not those were nec­es­sar­ily inline with the site’s cre­ators. In the same man­ner, I think peo­ple use LinkedIn to almost voyeuris­ti­cally see the ways they are linked to peo­ple in a pre­tend net­work online. It’s inter­est­ing in the way MySpace is inter­est­ing and it’s just as real.

I pre­fer to keep things as real as pos­si­ble. I like to actu­ally get emails from peo­ple I like telling me what they have been doing ver­sus see­ing it on a Face­book page or blog. I pre­fer to net­work with peo­ple I actu­ally would be will­ing to work with, not the first boss of 11 I had at the Evil Empire. My net­work is small, inten­tion­ally so, iron­i­cally because rela­tion­ships really do mat­ter. If they didn’t, LinkedIn would be the place to be.