Since its inception in 2003, the start-up LinkedIn, initially conceived as an influence platform for the networking and recruitment, is experiencing rapid growth, reaching over 10 million members in 2007. Its expansion is now global, exceeding one billion subscribers. While the idea of sharing career opportunities, maintaining a network of contacts, exchanging ideas related to the professional world is highly commendable in principle, the use that is actually made by certain corporations sometimes seems quite different.
Especially when it is reduced to being nothing more than a disseminator of political correctness, a hotbed of conformism and a display of faded good feelings. One must be (oh, astonished!) at the nuance, the absence of generalization, the end of hierarchy, the fight against exclusion, the rejection of discrimination, the integration of diversity, anti-racism and all these legitimate causes that benefit from a presumption of evidence. How can one still, without tiring, break down so many open doors?
It is that small corporations, digital Verdurins, find a point of support and comfort there. That of belonging to the camp of good. To be part of it, you must start by adorning your name with pretty emojis: a flower to beautify yourself, a leaf to cultivate your identity, a star to shine better, a heart to show your good heart, an explosive to signal your dynamism, or a lotus position to ostentatiously broadcast your inner serenity. The glorification of these childish drawings is done at the expense of more adult and professional qualities; but the important thing is to keep your child’s soul, these good souls bottle-fed on immaturity would retort.
The guardians of these good feelings congratulate each other in a series of exaggeratedly polite comments, putting zeal into flattering each other. Behind this drawing-room politeness, a heroization is at play; the construction of an eminently moral, understanding and benevolent image. With their eyes shining with amenity and their faces polished by kindness, here they are in an idealized version of themselves and of the professional world, outside the demanding reality constituting daily situations at work.
Behind the kindness, a fierce intransigence
In this ideal, almost Platonic vision, we must put an end to the difficulties of reality, which despite efforts at positive thinking remains hard and indifferent to our sorrows. To do this, we just need to erase the words that designate them: effort, competition, discipline, rigor, long time, competition, rivalry, negative… And to get around them by replacing arguments with accusations, management with magic formulas, training with entertainment, long effort with quick behavioral recipes, thinking for oneself with the ready-to-think of one’s clan, academic degrees with online titles, and wisdom with snippets of philosophy clumsily borrowed from our greatest thinkers.
If reality is no longer an embarrassment, the only thing that can upset the paladins of good is to be offended in their logic, contradicted in their evidence, rushed in their mediocrity. A despicable mistake that I commit regularly. This is where the lambs are let loose and we discover behind their composed benevolence the fierce intransigence and insolent bitterness of these little saints in need of success.
More than a social network, LinkedIn is a show. We find the same elements there: acting, masks, identity costumes, imaginary existences in which we are better and more fulfilled, applause, moral heroizations, demagogic music, more or less flattering spotlights, killings, in short, a whole human comedy. But if theater actors elevate our spirits, those of this network debase our intelligence by the emptiness of the truisms they convey. More than a professional site, LinkedIn unfortunately becomes the den of certain charlatans, the refuge of a large number of impostors who, in the exercise of their fiction and the vacancy of their function, proclaim themselves benefactors.
Julia de Funès has a doctorate in philosophy.
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