Tuesday, July 23, 2013

For the longest time, particularly during the early years of this website, I thought about implementing a commenting system to enrich our readership. Indeed, I pictured a golden age of online text, gilded by a spectacular, smartly moderated marketplace of talk that would facilitate the free exchange of ideas. But I never got around to it, and then came the advent of real social media, which created in me a deep despair, and Secondhand Rants now, as ever, will remain a one-way conduit of communication.

Social media is on my mind tonight because I was struck by how positively indifferent I felt when I logged onto LinkedIn today. It’s been more than a year since I crossed the proverbial finish line, and since then the sole reason for jamming my username into the sign-in box has been to field invitations. In an odd twist on social constructs, it’s considered rude to ignore solicitations from random people. Weren’t we taught as children to stay the fuck away from strangers who solicited us?

That’s the nature of LinkedIn, I suppose, and so goes the contours of business. You accept these invitations, then brace for the inevitable follow-up e-mail. On days when I’m not in the mood for pitches (e.g. “Do you have time for a quick 15-minute phone call?” or my favorite: “I’m going to be in town tomorrow.”) or insipid talk about weather, I politely shut down the request in favor of “reconnecting” at completely arbitrary intervals of time–four months from today, two quarters down the road, late next year. But going back to the topic of social media, can you really “know” 500+ people? Would you even want to do so? I’m regressing even further, I guess, in modern modes of engagement. A few weeks ago, I was offered a smartphone for work, and my initial reaction was to recoil in horror on the inside, followed by recoiling in horror on the outside.