Undignified Social Media

(apologies for weird formatting)

Alex Hayes wrote:

I'm noting a substantial shift in what I have decided is aggressive
marketing on LinkedIns behalf.

Ignore privately?

Repeatedly send me reminders that someone has friended me?

Despite numerous attempts to quell this unending stream it is the
faceless communication that causes me to imagine deleting the
application out of my life altogether.

Your experiences similar?

I replied:

Yeh I get this rubbish from LinkedIn as well. As well as notifications that person X has verified that I have skills in Y that I didn't even include in my LinkedIn profile. They are doing as Google 
does, as noted by Eli Pariser in The  Filter Bubble - trying to turn us into the person they think 
we want to be.

Of course Facebook does it par excellence. Podomatic does it, YouTube does it, Twitter does 

it.  It's all so undignified. All these social media sites clamouring over each other trying to get usto divulge more and more of who we are and what we do and believe so they can on-sell the 
aggregated data to third parties for profit and suck in more advertisers. It used to be so excitingbeing part of social media out there on the cutting edge but it's become well and truly 
mainstream and is now just an irritating pain. But that's now what we've got. Business models 
that capitalise on the bits and bytes of our activity. 

Interesting to note that some social media sites DO NOT do this - Flickr, Delicious, Blogger to name a few.  

What do I do about these annoying pestering exhortations to check out what my network is up 
to? Ignore them and delete and sigh.