One year ago, I locked myself out of my Instagram. Now, I go on LinkedIn, I can’t tell the difference.
Everyone talks about the hazards of social media. But as we embark into our professional lives, most authorities actually recommend sharing our lives and accomplishments on a corporate social media site. Or else we might not get hired. Our likelihood of getting accepted into an internship hinges on if our profile looks good enough. Everything, every job, and every achievement gets diluted down to shares and likes and posts and comments.
LinkedIn shares a general concept of Instagram: a platform for people to share photos and talk about themselves. Except LinkedIn is more than just social media. It’s corporate media. We post about our jobs, not our vacations. Yet, the negative social effect remains just as prevalent, if not more. Yes, it helps people connect to each other and easily direct message anyone you want, but the negatives are so much more effective.
On Instagram, if you see a friend or a stranger post cool pictures without you in them, people are bound to feel FOMO. But, if you see people on LinkedIn your age or younger posting about their jobs and their accomplishments, that feeling of being left out comes on that much stronger. Because we’re not just being left out on fun, we are being left out on opportunities to advance our career.
I constantly find myself comparing myself to other people on LinkedIn. It perverts the human spirit, comparison, as natural as it may be. And platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram breed comparison. After a constant barrage of what other people are doing, comparison to what you yourself are doing is inevitable. Everyone tells you to avoid holding your life up to that of others, but I find it impossible to avoid when we are systemically forced to plug ourselves in to these comparison machines.
How can we have a work-life balance when our work becomes our life, and our life becomes our work? If we don’t plug in to LinkedIn enough, we won’t look good to employers, and everything becomes a data point. Every action, every reaction, becomes something to post online. These social media sites have corrupted everything that a life and a career should be. Our life should be for the sake of ourselves, not the sake of others. Yet, we are compelled to share everything to the world.
Instagram and LinkedIn have created their own social habits: posting pictures, new jobs, awards, accomplishments, following people we only kind of know, stalking people’s pages, etcetera. They are presented as social resources, but I think they are perversions of their purpose. Social media platforms are invasive species into the communities they inhabit. Although LinkedIn is good for career advancement, it cannot shake social media’s adulteration of society.
Leave a Reply