Why I shut down my LinkedIn account

Sent in my year-end review of the magazine and book publishing industry article to Writer's Digest yesterday. I spent most of the weekend immersing myself in publishing news archives, emerged with my head stuffed full of mergers and acquisitions, launchings and closings.

But the main topic of this Blathering is to explain why I have shut down my LinkedIn account.

As some of you may already know, LinkedIn is a business networking system that relies on establishing connections with trusted contacts to expand one's professional network. I joined a few years ago because I was curious and supposed it might be useful. It wasn't; I suspect I'm not in the line of business that best makes use of this sort of service.

Instead, I received an increasing number of requests to connect from people I didn't know or didn't know all that well. During Inkspot, I interacted with hundreds of people I had never met or would ever meet, so I was hesitant about declining straight out in case I had worked with them before. Sometimes I would write back and ask something like, "So, um, how do you know me?" but this was an added hassle and also a bit awkward. Where do you draw the line, after all?

It was also clear to me that some of these requests came from people who didn't know me at all, but were collecting contacts like business cards. The more contacts they had, the less I trusted that these contacts were people they knew. The cartoon at the top of this page is probably a more legitimate basis for a LinkedIn connection that most of connections currently in the system.



I suspect that many in the LinkedIn system DO have at least one person on their list they don't know very well. Which undermines the system, of course, because then what's the point? That ONE person can then link to other people -- may be linking to hundreds of people, in fact, that THEY don't know very well, who also become part of your "network of connections." And then at some point it doesn't become all that different from the so-called Friends list on Myspace, where some users indiscriminately add as many names to their lists as they can, whether they know them or not. This is fine for purely social networks like MySpace, but undermines the whole trusted professional connections idea behind LinkedIn.

I'm sure LinkedIn works for some people; it just isn't worth the hassle for me. Last week I got a request from a total stranger that was forwarded from 3 or 4 connections down the line, asking for advice on how to get an agent. I already get 5-10 requests of this kind a week asking me for advice: how to get an agent, where to send a particular manuscript, how to get published, etc. I admit I have to ignore most of them, or use form letters to respond. There are already so many good resources online answering these types of questions, but it takes take time for me to have to look these up, time I could be spending on my own writing. Although my tendinitis is mostly healed, I still have to be aware about how much typing I do each day. And more than half the time that I do help the person, I never get even a brief "thank you" in return.

So I explained to this stranger that I couldn't really help her, that I got my own agent through a writer friend who had worked with me on my writing. In response, she sent me a request for a LinkedIn connection. I'm sure she's not the only person in the Linkedin network who felt that one brief interaction warranted a "work connection." I declined her connection invitation with an explanation that I only added people I actually knew and was sorry I couldn't accept her invite...but I'm sure many others would have accepted.

As for the woman, I never did get any kind of acknowledgement of my response or thanks for my time. And THAT's where a lot of people miss out on true networking opportunities; if she had responded more politely (responded at ALL), I'd be more likely to remember and be willing to interact with her again in the future.

Anyway, that pushed me over the edge re: deciding whether or not to keep my Linkedin account. If someone who knows me wants a recommendation, it's not all that hard to find my e-mail address. Closer friends and associates know my phone number.



(Above photo: A friend of the family's from Japan, Mabuta, created the above origami out of A SINGLE SHEET OF PAPER as a gift for my sister.)

Home recording studio update:

The MOTU 828 works with my computer, but unfortunately it doesn't have MIDI connections (is that the right term) and is not quite as portable I expected. Epi has very kindly let me borrow the 828 for a week or two while I investigate some other possibilities; I want to compensate him somehow if I don't end up buying his 828. Meanwhile, I'm using it to try adding some flute to Seanan's "Dorothy" track. Holy toledo, is this ever easy to do with Garageband. My only worry is that there's too much background noise on the recording; if I turn the other track off and just listen to flute, I hear a faint hiss. I guess I'll let Seanan's sound engineer try to deal with that (fingers crossed). Or if I decide to opt for another audio interface, I may wait to do the final flute track to see if that helps.

Last night I recorded flute for about a third of the song. I'm experimenting by doing this in bits and pieces. I've created two Real Instrument tracks: one to keep and one to experiment with. Whenever I'm happy with a flute bit I've recorded, I move it up to the Keeper track. This system seems to be working fine so far. :-)



(Above: big raccoon that was trying to get inside our green bin last night. He wasn't afraid of me at all.)

Finished reading a ton of books lately, but I'll post about those in a future Blathering.

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