Okay, Academics: Should I Be “LinkedIn”?

A colleague brought this to my attention: LinkedIn is introducing “University Pages.” (The technical details are mostly over my head, but you may be interested.) It looks to me as if the initiative targets students rather than faculty, though I don’t know whether that means faculty really have no role in “University Pages.” But it raises for me the perennial question:

Should I stop deleting those LinkedIn requests, and go ahead and start an account? As a scholar in Biblical Studies, should I be “LinkedIn”?

As far as I know, LinkedIn helps users do two things: locate jobs, and share “business opportunities.” In my field, it’s hard for me to imagine academics using LinkedIn to search for jobs (or publish a search): Firstly, there aren’t any jobs; and secondly, when there are jobs, any “Connections” are likely to be handled through other channels: like, say, email or just phone call. Sadly, job opportunities in Biblical Studies are rare enough that the relevant “social network” doesn’t require much infrastructure! Of course, employers might use LinkedIn to extend the reach of postings already published in the usual places, but I doubt they would: I expect that they already have more applicants than they can deal with. On the other hand, I can see how “business opportunities” might translate into my field, in the form of requests for articles and essays. It would be nice to imagine LinkedIn as a place where editors could search broadly for scholars who have already done some writing (or expressed an interest) in a given topic: an antidote for the “old boys’ network” where the invitations might tend to go only to “the usual suspects.”

But I’m writing all this tentatively, because I don’t really know LinkedIn. What I know are Academia.edu, Twitter, and Facebook. So you tell me, because I want to know: does LinkedIn offer us academics something not already covered by these platforms?

Academia.edu

Many of you may already know about Academia.edu, the social networking site for us academic types. There, you have a profile, and can upload papers (or link to them, or post abstracts) to share with other academics. You can choose to “follow” other users; as with Twitter (and as opposed to Facebook), this “following” relationship is assymetrical: you can follow users who do not follow you. Your profile includes your areas of interest, or research areas, such that you are notified when anybody publishes in those areas (even if you do not follow them). So, your notifications are basically of two kinds: notification that someone you follow has published something (anything), and notification when anybody at all has published in your areas of interest. (By “publish,” I mean, “publish to Academia.edu”).

I am the first to admit that I under-use Academia.edu. In fact, after drafting the above paragraph, I rushed over to my Academia.edu Profile to bring it back up to date, before any of you could go look at it. The interface has come a long way since the early days, but remains (in my view) a bit cludgy. For example, in my “About” area, the editing tools do not allow me to make “live links” for the web pages I list (like my Twitter page or my faculty web page at Garrett-Evangelical). Also, there is no way to customize the basic appearance of my Profile page. For example, the “About” area–which is where all the real info about me sits–is truncated to only a few words, unless the viewer expands it with the (tiny, hard to find) “More” link.

That said, my Academia.edu profile is usually the first or second item on a Google search for my name, and my Profile page has received over 1300 views. Bottom line, if Academia.edu is going to become, and remain, the “LinkedIn” of academic types, I’d rather continue my efforts at using that platform than reproduce those efforts in two places.

Twitter

Twitter is my go-to professional-development social network, especially regarding pedagogy, digital learning, and the state of higher education. There are fewer academic biblical-studies users (that I know about), and they can be rather hard to find, since it’s hard to isolate their profiles from those of non-academics posting confessional religious tweets. At least a couple of times a day, I “dip into the stream” of my feed and find conversations to join, or links to save for later reading. But for the most part, it is not a place where I find “business opportunities.”

Facebook

This is a bad week to ask me about Facebook. My knee is still jerking in response to their latest proposal for a change (if it is a change) in the Terms of Service, whereby they will begin using user’s images and content as part of their advertisements. So, I am working through my semi-annual consideration of dropping Facebook. In any case, Facebook is not really a “social network for professionals” kind of place, and I doubt many people use it as that. I use Facebook semi-professionally: I am Friends with faculty colleagues, administrators, and students, so my voice there is necessarily “work-cafeteria-appropriate.” I am Friends with a precious handful-plus of scholars in Hebrew Bible or ancient Near Eastern studies who post links to items of interest. But these are people I already know: I’m not finding other professionals in Biblical Studies on Facebook.

Are you an academic on LinkedIn? Or are you, like me, LinkedIn-curious? Should I be LinkedIn?

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