A Bit More Detail

The New Yorker's Colin Stokes has a funny essay pretending to berate a LinkedIn user for not maintaining enough of a productive presence on that social networking site. (How are you supposed to do that, again?)

Dear LinkedIn Member,

People are looking at your LinkedIn profile, and they’re laughing at what you, in a public forum, have decided to present as your professional identity. Last week, five people (who chose to remain anonymous) scrolled through your hobbies and skills and broke into fits of laughter at each one. When they looked at your employment history, noting the various part-time jobs and internships you thought it would be a good idea to include, they were almost in tears. I mean, come on—you like playing racquetball and you list “social media” as a skill? What does that even mean? You know what Twitter is and you own those weird-looking goggles? Somebody give this man a job! Seriously, we hope that you have actually found a job and are not, in fact, starving to death because you are incompetent.

Maybe that was a bit harsh. We’re just trying to get you to put some thought into your profile and maybe upgrade to … Oh, my God! Have you changed your profile picture in the past decade? It looks like you cropped yourself out of a photo you took with your high-school girlfriend at prom. Was prom the last time you wore a suit? I may have to sit down for a minute and catch my breath because, here at LinkedIn, we have never laughed quite so hard. Seriously, I just sent your profile to the C.E.O., and he forwarded it to the entire staff with the caption “Someone connect this guy to the twenty-first century!”

I probably shouldn’t have shared that anecdote with you, now that I think about it. But if that’s what it takes to get you to fix your profile, then I think the ends justify the means.

Something about the way I sank into the chair and yawning last night around 8 o'clock caused my to pop my my right temporomandibular joint, since it has caused me a lot of hassle. First I had to call Telehealth to be sure and get told that I should check it one, then I had to go to a walk-in clinic downtown to be told that I should see my dentist, then I walk down the street to my dentist and make an appointment for a week's time, then I have to go home with the strong suggestion that I should rest the jaw for the next bit, this rest including no "jaw jaw jaw." This unpleasantness, along with the strong desire to keep my dull pain from becoming actual shooting pain never mind wake-up-screaming-in-the-night pain, means that a pleasant night based on oral communication isn't going to be. Tabernac.

What will I do instead? Electronic communication will suffice nicely for the next bit, which works out since I wanted to write a blog post that began with Tumblr. A microblogging site like Twitter that includes an ability to readily share photos and video, this social networking service got some coverage recently in the free daily TTC-ubiquitous Metro, "Ups and Downs of a Tumblette's Life". "Tumblette."

Canadian Jaime-Leigh Fairbrother (a.k.a jaimeleigh) is supposedly a Tumblette: young, sexy and an over-sharer. The Tumblette — a vogue-ish tag for a female type who blogs on the website Tumblr — “lifecasts” with an edge.

[. . . ]

On her “for the story goes” Tumblr, the Toronto-based Jaime-Leigh Fairbrother bares all daily — from a series of self-point-and-shoot photos the 20-something blond snapped for a Semi-Naked-Picture-Day, to a controversial posting that included a spreadsheet mapping her bed-hopping history.

“People have a weird love for these sexual things,” says Fairbrother, who in person, is surprisingly demure. “We all talk about it... yet if you’re honest and shameless about it, you’re judged.”

At first glance, Fairbrother’s Tumblr is a female version of Tucker Max, whose drunken bro-ish hijinks recently made it to the big screen in I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.

It’s made Fairbrother a love-her-or-hate-her Tumblette: She’s garnered a cult of 800 to 900 active followers and, last week, was ranking higher than other micro-celebrities and fellow oversharers, like Internet star Julia Allison.

Fairbrother’s quick to recognize her Tumblr began over a year ago as a lonely, soliloquy-ing stream.

Her postings quickly garnered followers, especially through Tumblr’s unique re-blogging feature — the re-posting of content allows users to trace how one post is amplified or subverted by other users — which created a dialogue that would bounce between her, her followers and even non-followers.

(Jamie-Leigh's Tumblr blog is here. I like.)

Many of the Tumblr elements described above--the ability to share and reshare links, the ability to construct communities of readers, and so on--have been active functions of any number of blogging platforms and social networking systems for years. boasts about the Telegraph that "the smart thing to be doing online these days is tumblelogging, which is to weblogs what text messages are to email - short, to the point, and direct."

What interested me most about the article apart from its content was the way it positioned a certain demographic as core, 20-something women who are quite active and often very open online. This sort of association with an online social networking service with a stereotype isn't unfamiliar, and may not even be inaccurate, since social networks are famously lumpy. We're familiar with how MySpace is especially common among musicians and certain American socioeconomic classes, how Orkut surprisingly came to dominate the Brazilian and take off in absolute numbers in India, how English Canada went Facebook-mad long before French Canada, the networks which ensure LinkedIn is populated very largely by professionals and professional-wannabes, and, closer to home, the way that Livejournal is famously big among Russophones. My own blog presence is based on Livejournal since that's the platform where my friends and acquaintances were, and I'd be surprised if that wasn't the sort of thing that influenced all my readers at some point. One may as well be amazed that Flickr's users use that service to store and reproduce images.

Some stereotypes are accurate, even useful. Others, not so much. The use of the diminuitive "ette" to describe hard-core users of Tumblr struck me as interesting, inasmuch as "ette" is one of those terms that is either sexist or reclaimed from sexism. The latter is the one that applies here, but real stigma is elsewhere. I think particularly about how some talk about Livejournal as an embarrassing wasteland populated by whiny teenagers. While I was flattered when one blogger years ago cited A Bit More Detail as one of the few good things on Livejournal, I was not impressed even more by the insult paid to the hundreds of Livejournal users who are as interesting bloggers as anyone. Are Blogspot and Typepad really that much better? This prejudice has even been internalized: the maintainers of the very interesting russiamagazine community preface most of their posts by saying that the "Russian blogosphere conveniently, if bafflingly, revolves around LJ."

I don't like this prejudice. Negative stereotypes are always bad, especially the sweeping ones, never mind how these particular ones discourage some from taking full ("Why use Livejournal if people won't take me seriously?") and lead others to ignorantly reject huge, perfectly enjoyable, swathes of our great global online community. It's inevitable that the prejudice that infects humanity generally would manifest itself in this specific form, I suppose, and the sheer size of the online community makes picking-and-choosing inevitable regardless of the motives involved, too, but I still feel let down. What happened to the dreams of unfettered global community? More, was wanting to believe in them really inevitable?

Some people don't ever want me to stop using social networking systems.

[T]here is a new partnership between Twitter, hub for informing the world exactly what you're doing and thinking at all moments of the day, and LinkedIn, the business-networking tool on steroids. In an announcement Monday, the two companies explained that LinkedIn status messages can sync with Twitter.

"The business use case of Twitter is turning out to be very important, and more and more people are finding that the persona they create for themselves on the Web is part of their resume in many ways," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a joint video with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman that was posted to the LinkedIn blog.

So, in short, LinkedIn's "status" feature now syncs with Twitter with an optional check box--a feature that the two companies say should be rolling out over the next few days. Likewise, can set your Twitter status as your LinkedIn status by using the hash tag #li or #in, so that you can rest assured that your tweet about "watching Gossip Girl and eating cold pizza" won't immediately show up to potential clients or employers trawling your LinkedIn profile. (Full disclosure: This was my Twitter status tonight. If you believe that it renders me professionally unsound, please feel free to let me know.)

All snark aside, this is probably a very good bet for LinkedIn, which continues to grow fast and make money but which hasn't yet really jumped into the latest social-networking trend of real-time, streaming information. Inking a partnership with Twitter is much easier than launching some other kind of initiative to get members to update their statuses more often. Tweets sent to LinkedIn, presumably, could also be grouped in with LinkedIn status messages to form some kind of business-intelligence live stream. The sort of information that people want to share specifically with colleagues and professional associates could be of interest to high-end advertisers or the market research community.

Twitter, author Caroline McCarthy goes on to argue, can enjoy a symbiotic relationship with LinkedIn since that latter social networking system doesn't have the same sort of microblogging service provided by Twitter, and Twitter would gain access to the business-oreinted market that it would want. Facebook, in contrast, is already self-contained.