GulagedIn

In the Sunday Times, to which The Girlfriend subscribes and of which I am now in the habit of at least browsing every section, a business columnist has strong words for those who take their LinkedIn use to excess:

But some people end up erecting professional networks larger than the populations of some small developing nations. Can these LinkedIn megalomaniacs really know hundreds upon hundreds of people so well that they’d be willing to put their reputations on the line and vouch for their entire network’s professional competency?

One cannot help imagining the rise of a LinkedIn Hitler or Stalin, drawing in thousands of followers eager to be a node in a charismatic leader’s network — and then the purges begin. The lucky ones are completely excluded; others find themselves banished to MySpace.

The niceness police

I have sometimes used the term “niceness police” to refer to a particularly loathsome blog creature — the one who directs every conversation away from the substance and toward procedural issues such as tone, respectfulness, etc. I am now starting to think that the term “police” is more apt than I originally thought. We are all familiar, for instance, with cases where a person interacting with the police may shove an officer or the law or even just mouth off to said officer, and then the cop uses that as a pretext to taser his balls or something. Indeed, we are also all familiar with the trick where a cop will keep daring someone in custody to hit him, precisely so that he will have a pretext to unleash basically unlimited retribution on him. All the while, of course, the non-cop is told that he is actually responsible for the cop’s violent behavior.

I would submit that many members of the “niceness police” use similar techniques. You are mildly sarcastic in characterizing their argument; they retaliate by casting personal aspersions on you. You persist too stubbornly in thinking they are wrong; they begin speculating about your psychological makeup. If you point out the disproportion of the reaction, the response is that you started it — often mobilizing an inaccurate notion of what constitutes a personal attack. I doubt that many members of the niceness police consciously bait people, though, because part of the formula is that they are utterly lacking in self-consciousness when it comes to blog interactions — they believe themselves to be ontologically nice and respectful, even when their interlocutor has unfortunately induced them to fight dirty in simple self-defense.

A suggested improvement to Twitter

They should have an optional field for a link to accompany the post. This would obviate the need for URL shorteners. Presumably the goal of having only one field is to make things simpler, but using URL shorteners is not simple.

Thank you for your time.

Become a twit

You know how sometimes you’ll be on the bus or the train, or just waiting somewhere, and suddenly someone will start talking at random to no one in particular? Okay, now imagine if the social contract were altered so that that behavior was no longer awkward, but actually encouraged. That, in my admittedly brief experience, is what Twitter is.