There’s a bit of brouhaha building over Vincent Wright’s self-removal from LinkedIn. Notably over at Relationship Economy.
The central allegation is that LinkedIn failed on a number of levels to respond to its community and in consequence Vincent has withdrawn himself as an ubernetworker. The inference from this is that the community will collapse. I can sympathise with the first bit; but the second seems unlikely. A member’s withdrawal should not be an iceberg to a social network. Although it may well be a piece of pretty substantial flotsam.
Linked in is a networking tool. By analogy an individual is just a node on the network. His removal, while painful for friends and family should not jeopardise the network. When I disconnect from BT; nothing significant happens to BT. The network has resilience, it has moderate reliability (mutual trust and uber-networker abuse notwithstanding) and at scale it even has redundancy (I can in most cases get to people in a number of different ways, once I have a certain threshold of contacts. That’s part of what makes it fun).
And herein lies the dilemma. LinkedIn is a rich social communications toolset providing ad hoc connectivity to people in a business environment, mostly (perhaps sadly) for economic motivation. It enables communities, but it is not a community itself any more than all BT customers are somehow a community.
The more we project a common cultural identity onto these useful tools, the more disappointed we’re all going to be. PeterParkes approached us through LinkedIn, so we have good reason to be grateful to the network.