I’m currently reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger and I’ve therefore experienced a flare of disgust at the thought of building my personal brand (it’s essentially just more data for the surveillance capitalism monster).
The last year or so I’ve been posting about my doctoral research progress on Linkedin. I think I at some point started worrying about my future career (doctoral research is a very, very lonely endeavour and I sometimes lose my bearings) and thought I needed to make something of what I do seen. Please keep me in mind …!
Being in a better place now, I recently posted about two thrilling topics that I expected would spark enthusiastic discussion. Alas, they did not. I am not surprised, but I am outraged. What intellectual contribution does anyone bring with a thumbs up? None. And if it’s none, why am I trying to start a stimulating discussion in that forum?
In combination with my Doppelgänger mood, I’ve therefore started to move some of my old posts from Linkedin to my weblog and delete them from Linkedin. It’s annoyingly difficult to find out the publication date of a Linkedin post as it just says ”5mos” or similar, but I found this tool to help figure it out.
Why? Well, it’s my research journal, my professional endeavours, and my data. So it should be here, on my webpage, and not on ”social” media, gathering a collection of ”thumbs up” that really only says the conversation ended before it began.
good idea to collect your posts here!
Thank you, I thought so too!
Good timing. I just finished reading ”Digital Minimalism” and the author makes a very similar point regarding ”likes”. They add nothing, other than to turn social media (incl. LinkedIn) into a slot machine.
Agreed. Having tried (given serious effort to) Linkedin for a little more than a year I can conclude that it has neither given me job offers nor meaningful conversation. However, it did mean the report on Wikipedia and libraries I wrote got appreciative attention from a librarian in Colombia. That type of international networking, information sharing, and keeping in contact with would be hard to do through this weblog. So how to fill that gap?
I guess IFLA (and similar organisations) has a good newsletter structure. I wonder if a meaningful social aspect (outside of very expensive international conferences) could be added to that?