LinkedIn

Anyone had a look at LinkedIn, or got their profile on there?

And does it strike anyone like... Facebook?

I will admit I have a profile on there, but it really does feel like yet another social network trap, just under the guise of “professionalism” and “business”.  The pressure is there not to be on LinkedIn because you particularly want to be, but because everyone else is, the implicit message being you’ll be the odd one out.  Of course now it’s not just socially uncool to be the conscientious objector, but it’s professionally damaging too.

All of a sudden, it’s SpaceFaceMyBook all over again, trying to see how many “friends”/connections you can accrue, in the mistaken belief you’re encouraged to develop that this actually means anything in the real world.

I suspect the reality is that just like Facebook is actually a way to provide enough functionality to get people to voluntarily agree to stare at advertising, LinkedIn in a trap to get people to buy useless premium subscriptions to something they don’t need, by scaring them of the consequences otherwise.  And then in the future, they’ll start providing webmail, online collaboration, secure document storage and hosting etc – and we’ll all just have to buy into it... because it’s the new paradigm.  By the time people realise it’s an artificial construct it’s too late, you’ve already taken the blue pill.

The more I think about this sort of stuff lately, the more I realise that increasingly we’re all being very cleverly manipulated.

Everything from moving away from in-TV adverts to in-program product placement, which you can’t avoid, and is so subliminal that you don’t even know it’s being done to you.  The human brain has an excellent ability to discard rubbish, the average person ignores at least 85-90% of what they see and hear every day.  Can you remember any of the billboards you drove past on the way to work?  But the ability and facility to do that is something we’ve learned by recognising advertising when we see it, thus giving us the ability to isolate it from what we bother assimilating

 I know I do it now with banner ads on websites, to the point where SWMBO fairly frequently points out I have porn open on my screen at home in a banner somewhere; I honestly don’t see the damn things.

Now, how do you do that when the message is ingrained into the content you actually want to absorb?  Like your TV program?  Or the SpaceFaceMyLinkedInBook web page you’re looking at?  Or when it’s ingrained into your daily and professional pattern via communication and resources and you can’t escape it?

I used to think that we’d be in trouble when Minority Report-style targeted advertising would be popping up in front of us as we walked down the street, but now I tend to think otherwise; this