Building a social network, one auto-generated message at a time
Today I received an invitation to join ResearchGate, which I gather to be a kind of social network for scientists. I'd never previously heard of ResearchGate and, almost certainly, they'd never heard of me. I nonetheless warranted an invitation because I co-authored a number of papers with someone who had already enrolled.
I mostly reject automated invitations of this sort, in part because I resent web sites expanding their business by taking advantage of my relationship with a third party and in part because I like to think that my real friends would be bothered to write real e-mails. But my experience of LinkedIn is my greatest motivator.
At the time I received my LinkedIn invitation, I had no experience of such sites and it seemed worth a try. But I never found anything useful I could do with it, and I gradually realised that my LinkedIn page was a graveyard of ex-colleagues who had sent me connection invitations but with whom I no longer actually communicated (via LinkedIn or otherwise). I began to wonder if sending a LinkedIn invitation was a tacit declaration that "I will never talk to you again."
After a few years of this, I began replying to invitations with a personal e-mail explaining that I don't really use LinkedIn. In response, one of my would-be connections admitted that she didn't really use LinkedIn either, but she just felt compelled to click on the "Do you know?" buttons. I was already pretty sure that my own LinkedIn connections were a fraud, and my friend's message suggested to me that I'm not the only one. I've since deleted my LinkedIn profile, and I refuse all new invitations with an e-mail explaining that I don't use LinkedIn.
It still feels slightly rude to reject invitations, and perhaps LinkedIn members feel it would be rude to ignore the question "Do you know?" when they do, indeed, know that person. I wonder if we instead ought to feel rude for allowing Internet companies to exploit our relationships in order to build their customer bases, and to present false social networks built up by automated messaging and idle button-clicking?
