Letter to the Editor: Grind Culture
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Robert,
With regards to your take on LinkedIn and Jaron Lanier. I’m a big fan of Lanier and I read his books but I think he’s wrong on LinkedIn. Sure it can help people find work, but it’s designed with lots of psychological tricks to make you feed it.
Features like “x people have looked at your profile” try to make you pay for LinkedIn Plus or whatever it’s called. Trying to get you to “complete your profile” by nagging. And have you ever tried to find how to quit it?
It also encourages shallow correspondence and lazy people connecting and spamming you with whatever service they think you should buy.
All a bit “grind culture,” shallow and non-human. It’s the opposite of the old Web and what blogs seemed to have, and why I hope they’ll have a resurgence.
Reader A.
*
You’re right of course, A. Your “grind culture” is inherent to most social media (by which I mean moaning about overload or showing off about dubious white-collar successes) but LinkedIn is solely towards work. I suppose I saw it as a way of connecting employers to CVs, which is marginally useful, but if users are encouraged to fart out a perpetually-scrolling litany of humblebrags, it can “get in bin” as they say.
Death to all social media! So far as online life goes, it’s email, blogs and forums for me.
The current chatter about Twitter suggests that people really will go back to some of those methods, though I recently heard a young pop star describe email as “so toxic” and she does all her talking though Instagram and WhatsApp. I suppose she means that email can all too easily pile up and become unmanageable, but aren’t social media posts and messages practically infinite? At least with email you can unsubscribe from things you don’t like and just change your address if it comes to the worst. You’re less likely to be trolled by email than on social media and your email client probably isn’t Facebook (or Meta or whatever they’re calling themselves now) like those two platforms are, which is surely as toxic as it comes if we’re talking social responsibility. I don’t really know what she meant by “toxic” but I hope she’s an outlier and that the cool kids get on board with alternatives to the mega-platforms.
About Robert Wringham
Robert Wringham is the editor of New Escapologist. He also writes books and articles. Read more at wringham.co.uk
Someone recently saw the 23,330 unread emails alert on my phone and had a fit. Apparently it is terrible for the environment as all of that data is taking up sever space which burns a lot of energy. I’d never considered that. I can’t see how social media would be any different though!
It’s surely the same if not worse with social media. All those posts going back a decade. A good reminder for people to actually delete their accounts instead of just ceasing to tweet. 23,330 unread emails though, Murry? How do you live with yourself?! I’d spend a pretty day eradicating those.
I have no interest in wasting my time clicking on the 100s of marketing emails I get a week!