I’ve found that as I enter the professional world, LinkedIn has become a unique source of my anxieties.
For those of you unfamiliar with the website, LinkedIn launched in 2003 as an online database for job-seekers looking to discover employment opportunities and network with industry professionals. In 2016, Microsoft bought it for $26.2 billion, and there are tens of millions of recent graduates and students registered on the site.
LinkedIn shares the same features of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter — timelines, chat boxes and status updates. Yet despite its large number of users, LinkedIn has somehow avoided controversy regarding the toxic online culture it perpetuates.
Finding out that The Royal Society for Public Health ranked Instagram as the worst platform for mental health in a 2017 report would be neither interesting nor surprising. Which is to say, when we talk about the “dark side” of social media culture, platforms such as Instagram or Snapchat, that cater to a younger demographic, are easy targets.
However, it’s important to acknowledge that despite LinkedIn’s ability to distance itself from the negative public perception shared by other social media platforms, it still creates a similar culture of competition.
A couple of weeks ago, I was updating my LinkedIn headline for the third time that month. I was deciding between “English major at Boston University” and “English Major at Boston University” — trying both on for size to see which looked more professional. After I settled on the latter, I was left with the same, unsatisfying feeling that always lingers whenever I make changes to my profile: I’m not good enough.
The reality is, deciding whether or not I capitalize “major” isn’t going to be the deciding factor between me finding a job and unemployment. However, that’s not where my feelings of inadequacy were stemming from.
Having a headline that says “English Major” didn’t hold the same social capital as some of the headlines I have read from my peers. I didn’t have a senior leadership role at some millennial tech startup, run my own line of luxury incense or participate in life-changing pharmaceutical research. I was simply “Alexia Nizhny — English Major at Boston University.”
How could I compete?
This cut-throat competitiveness, I would argue, is the driving force behind LinkedIn’s success. The reason the site works so well as a social media platform is because its entire purpose is to shamelessly show off your accomplishments. By putting our resume online, we are pushed to humble-brag in order to fulfill our need to impress and outperform one another.
Although The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that humble-bragging works ineffectively as a self-presentation strategy, it’s still so easy to get lost in the glamour of status updates and headlines. It’s only natural that we strive to be a hot commodity in the job market, and LinkedIn capitalizes off that.
“This is something that your boss sees, your future boss, people you want to work with in the future,” Daniel Roth, LinkedIn’s editor-in-chief, said in a New York Times interview. “It’s as close to your permanent record as you can get.”
Admittedly, that’s terrifying. With that said, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be the best version of yourself online, but it’s still important to not determine your self-worth based solely on your LinkedIn headline.
I don’t have to be “Alexia Nizhny — Senior Leader at Millennial Tech Company,” in order to be successful. So for now, being “Alexia Nizhny — English Major at Boston University” has to be good enough for me.
