Tuesday, June 4, 2013

LINKEDIN'S PERVERSE LINKING IN


 
Dear blog-friends, the story I am going to tell you is true, I am just going to fictionalize it a bit and change the names of its two protagonists for a matter of discretion, even if I am not sure if, at least one of the two, would deserve that.
Any comment on what I am going to report and reflect upon, any interpretation would be sincerely relished.
 
Around one month ago this message reached me in my email box: “Myra Windmiller wants to connect with you on Linkedin”. Now, I had stopped contacting and seeing Myra Windmiller for a long time since she was someone who had disgraced me, to use a kind expression, in a traumatic manner. She, on her part, had  never tried to contact me either for at least two years.
I still had her email address and I sent her immediately a brief message, maybe just because I was too puzzled, telling her I do not trust social networks and” please contact me directly via a normal email if you have anything to tell me”, something I strongly doubted and in fact she did not answer, which was, by the way, typical of her.. that brought back to my mind her reactions in the past that consisted in never answering in any possible way, with any possible means.
Now, the problem is I am maybe too curious and I wanted to understand the reasons of that message.
After two days I answered to the message itself asking to the dear Linkedin people whether they had sent me themselves the invitation, by their own choice, without ever being contacted by Myra. For days I didn’t get any answer, checking then my emails I realized that answering Linkedin’s email  and writing my question to them I had in fact sent the message to Myra because the answer button contained no Linkedin’s address but directly Myra’s address!
Vastly disappointed I entered Linkedin’s website, passing through the usual jumble of passwords and tricks and internet paraphernalia I wasn’t in the least enjoying, to find a way to get some information. In Linkedin I found many people, some of them I knew well, others I absolutely did not, I clicked buttons simply to go on and find a space dedicated to enquires about the messages of invitation. Eventually, after ages, two-three days, I found it and wrote the same message of enquiry I had unknowingly sent to Myra. An answer arrived, one week later by someone called Irene, it was a very kind answer in which Irene told me that in no way they “invented” an invitation by someone who hadn’t, through them, clearly expressed the desire to contact someone else.
I at once wrote back to Myra pasting her invitation in my message and reporting Irene’s message.
At the end of my message I typed a big WHY. Did I receive any answer from Myra? Well… you can well imagine!
In the meantime some friends sent me messages telling me that I had invited me to join me on Linkedin! Even an old lady who lived in Malta and who I had seen last time two years before.
In the meantime I kept receiving messages from Linkedin again referring about other people Myra was in contact with. A deluge of messages from Linkedin was getting into my email box. I deleted everything, I deleted my connection, among my favourite sites, with Linkedin.
Now the deluge has stopped at last, or does it lie dormant?
A question, after this, is inevitable, echoing a famous Bob Dylan’s song: are we internet users pawns in which game, in whose game?

2 comments:

Dave King said...

Strikes me that social networks are anybody's game. Apart from blogging, I avoid them like the plague.

Crafty Green Poet said...

I had a Linked In account but just gave it up, because i was getting no use from being there at all, plus they keep sending out annoying emails.

I like Twitter though and Facebook has its uses. it's all about managing your own useage of them rather than allowing the social network to use you. Linked in is the only one I've found that abuses it's direct interactions with individuals, though Facebook is becoming increasingly annoying.