How the LinkedIn Bubble Got Me

Social media didn't exactly sneak in, but its current behaviour did

Photo by Alfred Kenneally on Unsplash

LinkedIn, 18 years ago

I was a much younger man then, having just got a manager job where the main goal was to hire as many IT consultants as possible.

Now, where do you find so many IT consultants? Today there are lots of options, and not the least LinkedIn, where everybody seems to have a profile.

But 18 years ago, I had never heard about LinkedIn until my new boss told me the fascinating story of how he was very much into networking and was keeping track of all the people in his network, several links away.

I started checking up on this, knew about some theories but wondered how it was done in real life. As far as I remember, I found LinkedIn through this hunt for knowledge — some people found in a Google search endorsed it.

I got an account, and there were indeed several consultants on LinkedIn! How lucky I was.

But…

People didn’t like to be contacted. I was very polite, told them through an InMail how I had found their profile, and that I was in the process of finding and hiring more consultants, so maybe they would like to talk about it?

Almost everybody I contacted this way got angry, talked about spamming, intrusion in their private life, etc., and I was somewhat chocked. How could it be that they had put their CV on the internet — and then they were angry about being contacted?

Well, LinkedIn was a different place then, as was social media in general. People didn’t understand well what it was and how it worked.

And today

I am not hiring anybody, but I get almost daily contact requests and messages from people who want to tell how they are available for work, so if I should need to hire, then…

There are some opinions aired now and then in the stream about if and how to connect to others, but the main trend seems to be “playing precious” by saying that “I want a real explanation in the contact message, otherwise I’ll say no” in the posts and comments, but somehow people end up with thousands of contacts anyway.

Me too, even though it seems to be stagnating. A social medium only provides an echo of what you do — and if you do nothing, there is no echo after some time; it is slowly dying out and then finally disappearing.

What happens there instead

It is difficult to say exactly why, but I can browse through the stream for tens of minutes without finding anything personal or just related to people I really know. It is all just promotions from people who have something to sell, mixed with paid advertising from big companies.

Those people, having something to sell, are influencers of some kind, and they are good at making it look like they are interested in the people who comment on their posts.

It is easy, for a moment, to feel that they are some kind of friends.

But in comparison to real friends, they will not notice if you are away. They will also get scared and not answer if you touch a real life topic in a comment — because they provide a carefully crafted world of ideas, ideals, and services. Everything else is just a disturbance and potentially damaging for their image.

What I wonder

What happened to all the contacts, I connected to 18 years ago? They never show up in my stream.

How about all those hundreds of former colleagues, with whom I made a connection when changing my job? They never show up in my stream either.

And what about those many people who came in during waves from Facebook, at first bringing in their Facebook habits — which annoyed the “old” LinkedIn people — then adapting a bit to become one with the wallpaper but still talking? I never see any of them any more.

They are all in my connections list, but they are mute — to me, at least.

All those who are talking, all the influencers, are new on LinkedIn, having joined within the last two years or so.

It is like being in one of those science fiction movies where the main character wakes up one day, only to find out that all the known people around him have been replaced with some others. Waking up as someone else, perhaps, or simply having been teleported to another dimension.

That’s where I am on LinkedIn — in another dimension.

Now, about the bubbles

I have an education as a social media manager. I have managed many accounts on many media. And I have studied various topics around media, making it perfectly clear to me that I live in a bubble.

Like everybody else.

There is so much information to have in this world of today, that we all select some of it — and reject some of it as well.

We are creating a small universe that we can handle, made of what we can overview, ruling out all the rest. The algorithms of a social medium helps make that happen — if we are not clicking on certain types of contents, we will see less of this, and if someone is eager to tell us their message, we will see more of that.

If I myself post something on a social medium, such as LinkedIn, it will similarly reach only to the edges of my bubble. Nobody outside it will even know that I wrote it, and I will not know that they don’t know.

Many people seem to believe that they are talking to the world, feeling like big fishes in the big sea, when they are, in fact, big only in their little bubble.

With hundreds of millions of people using LinkedIn, my bubble of a few tens of thousands of people is quite diminutive.

I have been isolated.

My bubble owns me and keeps its protecting sphere intact, to prevent me from seeing that the universe is actually much bigger than I think.

And it is only because I have been there for so long that I can see how something is missing — some people.

We choose, but…

The common understanding of bubbles is that they are our own choice. We follow one newspaper, unfollow another, and that adjusts our bubble and the news we see, and how we see them.

Similarly, following people — and now also, with the new algorithms — interacting with them, will add to or detract from our bubble.

But knowing this very well, I cannot help thinking that a lot of adjustments have happened without my conscious decisions. Maybe what I did in a series of likes, comments, follows, connections, etc., were shaping my bubble, but it happened without me noticing what was going on.

The current situation

I feel like a stranger, like that science fiction figure in a universe where everybody entered a year ago and all the old friends, neighbours, colleagues, etc., are gone. And none of the new ones understand a word of what I say when I ask “where did they go?”

They never saw those missing people come, they never saw them leave. They may not even believe me when I claim that they do exist.

I feel like a ghost. Should have left long ago, together with the world I belonged to, but somehow I missed the train.

My old bubble must have burst and a new one swallowed me. Such a feeling. Is that what it is like to grow old?