208B: Blog Assignment 7
- LinkedIn. Connect with people you know. Fill out your profile.
Done.
- Analyze how you construct your identity on LinkedIn
The LinkedIn service (like many a YASNS) asks you to fill out a bunch of forms and then displays your identity to you and others one degree away. I found this a tad unintuitive as after filling out the forms, I only then became aware of how this would look in my profile. Naturally, after seeing this and the sweet titles that others had made up for themselves, I had to go back and change mine because it was too long and not catchy.
I found LinkedIn to be a tad strange in this respect... that is, it wants you to be someone with a career. I'm not sure I have a career... I have goals but even those (like "to help people") are somewhat abstract and span a whole slew of possible industries other than "make money" and "kill people".
- Is this service an effective way to find job connections? Why (not)?
LinkedIn is somewhat hobbled by the privacy vs. networking trade-off. For example, the only person that will read this blog entry, danah, has a shitload of connections and I'm sure they're all very interesting people. However, I'm not allowed to see any of her connections. In social networking, this is a squeeze spot... that is, none of danah's connections will ever know I am connected to her and won't be able to connect with me, presumably because of privacy considerations.
Doesn't that defeat the whole idea of networking? I think they need a more complex model and infrastructure for networked connections. People should be able to 1) decide which of their connections are viewable by others of their connections (which could be a pain in the ass but undoubtedly better than the current state of affairs) and 2) decide whether or not a certain connections connections can view their profile.
- Analyze the service considering the Granovetter readings.
It's all about information theory... signal to noise. LinkedIn practically floods us with noise as people put themselves on a pedestal. That's why any real employment connections that are catalyzed by LinkedIn will have to be vetted to ensure that one is who they say they are.
Posted by joebeone at Mayo 14, 2004 08:23 AM