I was an enthusiastic early adopter of LinkedIn—among the first 500k members, or so they once told me. Today, the site is busily transforming itself into just another pronoun-littered social media channel that kicks people off for unacceptable opinions about mRNA vaccines. Still, it’s an easy way to make your professional persona available to people who might be interested in your services.
Yesterday I went through my LinkedIn contacts and mercilessly deleted a handful of recently retired people. I didn’t do it to be mean, but because they had self-identified as out of the game. If they are no longer working why should they clutter up my professional contacts network? They should relax, put their feet up, and enjoy the grandchildren. I raise my glass to your long and successful career!
But there’s another set of contacts that is tougher to remove: the recently deceased. These are people I worked with and respected. Some were at the peak of their profession. To delete them feels callous. Plus, their profiles connect me to dozens of other people—we were once a tightly knit group. Do I really want to reduce our common bond?
But if I’m deleting retirees, why not delete the deceased? What’s the logical difference?
The problem arises because the online world has no exit path, no way to acknowledge that someone has passed away. What if their former page was automatically transformed, post mortem, into a memorial page?
Here lie the digital remains of John Doe, late of Acme Widgets, and these were his 500+ colleagues, acquaintances, mentees, and suck-ups.
It’s a nice solution, no? John Doe’s profile lives on, perhaps with a black wreath to indicate “permanently offline.” And the rest of us no longer have to make the emotionally fraught decision whether or not to pull the plug on our old friend.