Shutting My LinkedIn Profile

I’ve done a lot of thinking about my relationship with social media over the last few months. Perhaps my mind has been giving me subtle approbation when I’ve found myself checking my Facebook on my phone while cuddling my son to sleep in his bed.

These are precious moments in his young life and in a year or two he’ll be like “get the fuck out of my bed, Dad” but for now he still likes my presence as he goes off to sleep. And I have the chance to be near to him, to hear his breathing deepen and to be his guardian against the monsters that still lurk under his bed. To be his dad.

And apparently I can punctuate these moments without a second’s thought to check what random strangers are commenting on on Facebook. Fair enough, it’s quite boring lying there in the dark waiting for the snoring to start, but I should be able to spare my son 10 fucking minutes of my time without seeing if people are responding to my hilarious status updates.

I know the world is all about “connecting and sharing with the people in your life” – according to Facebook at least – but how did we reach the point where professional people will Tweet about death sentences?

Anyway, so I quit Twitter a few months back. Haven’t missed it. Bebo & MySpace went West too  and weren’t even worth a blog post.

Now in the firing line is LinkedIn. I’ve never enjoyed or seen the point of it, except for a spell when I was looking for a job last year and figured I should be on there in some capacity. As it is, all I’ve had out of it is a string of messages requesting that I add someone who has “indicated we’ve done business together”, when actually we’ve done no such thing. 36 outstanding requests to be added to my network! My network! Ha!

So anyway, that account’s gone west now. So if you were looking for my “professional details” and you’ve only been able to find this site: sorry. This is my personal site, my life and I don’t have a professional profile. I’m just me, for better or worse.