LinkedIn: Just Another Malignant Social Media Phenomenon

A cloud of technological doom sullies the blue skies of Claradise

Do you, too, feel a sense of impending doom when you see that blue and white “in” logo pop up on your laptop? Do you, too, turn green at the ping of yet another email threatening you to accept invitations from strangers you vaguely recall making small talk with once?

LinkedIn, a professional online network designed to connect employers and employees, is overrun by a toxic subculture of competition, superiority complexes and experience-measuring contests. The platform claims to make our lives better but has transformed into another quintessential aspect of Santa Clara that may not live up to all it claims to be.

Especially in the Bay Area tech industry, LinkedIn has become a place for many to flex their skills and achievements in an effort to feel superior to others. But, just like many social media platforms, the search for clout has rendered it an artificial environment with fake, hyped-up profiles. 

“We always have to ask ourselves: is social media connecting us more genuinely or is it creating filters in which we only see this perfected image of someone?” said Dr. Matthew Gaudet, who teaches Technology and the Good Life, a class that focuses on the intersection of theology and technology. “I think LinkedIn has the same problem. We curate and post based on how we’re going to be perceived out there, and we don’t actually build up genuine relationships.”

You end up blindly creating connections with near-strangers in the hopes of having the most connections, creating a pressure cooker of an environment where seeing your peers fight for the most connections pushes you to do so as well. 

“I felt overwhelmed using LinkedIn because there are so many different options,” said Tripti Pandey, a sophomore bioengineering major. “There’s definitely pressure to know a certain amount of people and connect with that many people.”

In addition, LinkedIn amplifies our insecurities and feelings of inadequacy, generating a perceived need to embellish our image. There’s an ever-present pressure to have done as many things as possible, to the point where you are left grasping at anything you might be able to enhance and exaggerate into marketable skills or achievements. 

“Sometimes [going on LinkedIn] feels great, especially when you are connecting professionally with co-workers, students and people who work for interesting companies,” said junior Max Campos, a user who has achieved the highly sought-after 500+ connections. “But at times it feels as if the network is predicated on narcissism and self-aggrandizement.”

This sentiment is echoed by Pandey, who attended the Bay Area’s Dougherty Valley High School in San Ramon, CA, a school locally branded as having an extremely competitive academic culture. 

“I think people were obsessed with LinkedIn at Dougherty because it resembles some sort of social media,” she said. “The number of connections you had in high school wasn’t exactly the number of positions you’ve worked or genuine references you have, but rather the number of people that you know and are able to connect with: almost a popularity contest.” 

When crafting profiles, we end up overcompensating for the skills, achievements and unique items we’re lacking in, creating a vicious cycle of doom and gloom. It’s important to remember that having slightly distant professional relationships might not always be a bad thing. But, if the purpose of social media is to form these relationships, what is social media’s purpose in the good life? 

“Is social media wholly bad or is social media wholly good?” Gaudet asked, concluding, “Neither.”

LinkedIn’s functionality is a positive alternative to the nepotism-based connections that we see commonly in various job industries. It provides an easy way to connect and acts, to a certain extent, as an equalizing platform. But we have to consider if (or, more likely, when) it will reach the point of no return–when there is no longer any genuine connection. 

The way we use LinkedIn needs to improve. If we simply churn out information pertinent to our career or image, we reduce ourselves to mass-marketed products. On the flip side, if we add too much personality, we run the risk of reducing our professionalism. As a whole, Linkedin culture must shift with workplace culture, and begin to prioritize humanity over–or at least on par with–the work itself.

“When profit itself is being valued, then we’ve lost a sense of what the good life is,” said Gaudet. “I think here in Silicon Valley, we often take things that are supposed to be instrumental and turn them into values themselves.”

Money is generally valued as an instrument to achieve some other goal that is important for its own sake (e.g. happiness or safety), and while that’s true for many, higher-ups in the tech industry instead consider money itself to be intrinsically valuable. We have sadly reached a point of considering profit as an end rather than a means and prioritizing it over, for example, working to improve the world. 

Mark Zuckerberg has a famous motto that many of Silicon Valley’s tech companies live by: “Move fast and break things.” But it’s this idea—a disruption for disruption’s sake—that causes us to develop technology without intentionality–so as our morality degrades, the quality of the industry’s products follow. 

As such, the way we use LinkedIn is inherently flawed, leaving us with a contrived idea of the good life. 

“We’ve become so focused on the technical side of things that we forget why we’re doing it all in the first place,” Gaudet said. “We need to maintain the focus on if we’re remaining true to our mission—and what is our mission?”

Our mission should be to foster real human connection by not limiting the value of people to an assembly line for profit.