Are We Entertaining Ourselves to Professional Death?

How LinkedIn became our digital television.

1. The Irony of a “Professional” Network

LinkedIn was once the place where professionals came to learn, exchange, and grow.
Today, it increasingly looks like every other social platform - curated selfies, motivational one-liners, and bullet-point “life lessons” from people who discovered sales two fiscal quarters ago.

It’s not that people have changed.
It’s the medium that has.
As Neil Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death, “when people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, a nation is in danger.”
LinkedIn isn’t a nation, but it is a mirror of our professional culture - and lately, that reflection looks more like entertainment than expertise.

Created by Dali

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2. The Medium Shapes the Message

In 1985, Postman warned that when entertainment becomes the dominant format of communication, every subject - politics, religion, education, even commerce - turns into show business.
His point wasn’t that people are shallow. It was that the medium decides what can be said, and how seriously we’ll take it.

LinkedIn has become our professional television.

Its user base is young - nearly half between 25 and 34 - and predominantly male (~57 %). Ambitious, expressive, and digitally fluent. The platform rewards precisely that: visibility.
When the algorithm prizes engagement over depth, style inevitably outpaces substance. The result? A flood of “5 lessons that changed my career” and “3 things I learned from rejection” - not all bad, but rarely deep.

The Media rewards the content format based on its audience.

A study of 64,000 LinkedIn creators showed that 58 % have fewer than 5,000 followers, and 71 % get less than 1 % engagement (including myself).
So a massive number of people are talking, but very few are really heard.
And yet, the machine keeps encouraging more posting, more performing, more content.
Because engagement, not insight, fuels its economy.

Professional influence, however, should rest on expertise and trust - not visibility and performance. Buyers themselves say the top traits of an effective B2B influencer are expertise (53 %), trustworthiness (52 %), and authenticity (36 %).
But in a medium built for speed, authenticity often looks rehearsed, and expertise gets mistaken for confidence packaged.

And here’s where I should be honest.
I don’t have a huge following. My posts don’t go viral.
That’s fine. My main job is to sell - not to trend.
Writing here is something else: a way to share, to help, to think out loud. I haven’t yet found the perfect way to merge selling and helping without one cheapening the other.

Maybe that’s the real paradox of LinkedIn. The medium wants us to entertain. The profession asks us to serve. And between the two, many of us are still searching for our voice.

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3. The Rise of Sales Influencers – or the Illusion of Mastery

Scroll through your feed and you’ll meet an army of “#1 Sales Reps,” “Top 1 % Closers,” and “Award-Winning Dealmakers.”
Most profiles look remarkably similar: two or three years of experience, a few bold claims, and a steady stream of perfectly optimized posts.

I don’t blame them.
The platform rewards the appearance of expertise faster than the acquisition of it.
When success is measured in impressions, not performance, those who look confident inevitably outshine those who are competent.
The art of selling becomes a spectacle of self-selling. And let’s be honest - no one stages that spectacle better than America. They’ve made confidence a product category.

We used to measure salespeople by the customers they served or the problems they solved.
Now we measure them by their ability to post about it.
The “top Rep” isn’t necessarily the one who won the toughest account - it’s the one who tells the most polished story about doing so.

But sales, by nature, is already a performance - one that takes place behind closed doors, in meetings, in negotiation rooms, in failure and follow-up. The best Reps don’t broadcast; they iterate. They learn. They build credibility in silence.
And that’s exactly what the algorithm can’t see.

The danger isn’t that people post.
It’s that the performance becomes the job - that we start optimizing for applause instead of accuracy.
And when everyone plays the same part, the chorus of sameness grows deafening.
A thousand voices saying the same thing, just slightly louder than the others.

If Postman were alive today, he’d probably smile and say: “LinkedIn didn’t kill professional discourse. It just gave it better lighting - the kind that flatters faces more than ideas.”

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4. The Consequence – Professional Shallowness

The result isn’t malice - it’s erosion.
The erosion of nuance, context, and critical thought.

When everything must fit in a carousel, complexity becomes a liability.
When every insight must be “snackable,” we stop chewing on ideas.
We skim, scroll, react - and call it learning.

We’re mistaking the appearance of knowing for the effort of understanding.
And that’s precisely what Postman meant by “disinformation”: not falsehoods, but misleading fragments that create the illusion of knowledge.
In this new epistemology of scrolling, we’re flooded with content yet starving for meaning.

You see it in the repetition of advice - “be customer-centric,” “build trust,” “follow up with empathy.” True, of course. But empty once detached from context, from story, from the friction of real work.
It’s like trying to learn music by reading motivational quotes about harmony.

The risk isn’t that we become uninformed.
It’s that we lose the ability to tell the difference between being informed and being entertained.

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5. The Rebellion – To Inform, Not to Perform

I write for those who still value thought over theater.
For those who prefer to understand selling rather than brand themselves as salespeople.

I don’t want to be part of the chorus. I’d rather play a different instrument - even if the melody is slower, quieter, less viral.
Because reflection, not recognition, is still what builds mastery.

The truth is, entertainment has always been seductive. It flatters us, distracts us, and makes everything feel lighter.
But improvement is heavier. It requires silence, humility, and repetition.

So no, this page isn’t meant to entertain you.
It’s meant to challenge you, inform you, and remind you that growth doesn’t need an audience.
The real work - the deals, the doubts, the lessons - happens off-stage.

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6. The Irony (and the Confession)

And yes - before someone points it out - I know the irony.
Here I am, posting a long reflection about not performing… while performing a long reflection.
Guilty as charged.
To my defense, most of what I write takes more than five minutes to read.
So I’m using a platform designed for speed to promote slowness - maybe a pure act of rebellion, or of stupidity. Time will tell.
But perhaps that’s the only way to fight the algorithm - not by escaping the stage, but by refusing to dance to its rhythm.

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7. Closing Reflection

Maybe LinkedIn today is our professional version of Brave New World.
We’re not oppressed by ignorance - we’re seduced by distraction.
We’re not told what to think - we’re too busy performing to think at all.
And as long as the applause feels good, few will notice the silence that follows.

But some will.
And those few might just rebuild what’s been lost - one thoughtful post, one real conversation, one unfiltered idea at a time.

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Author’s Note

Yes, I write under The B2B Specialist.
Not out of secrecy, but separation.
My daily job is to sell - to represent a company, defend a pipeline, deliver a number, and lead a team.
This space is different. It’s where I can share what I’ve learned without a logo attached.
Helping others isn’t part of my quota - it’s part of my sanity, and my desire.

So if this post earns a few likes, I’ll take them.
But I’d rather it earns a few minutes of thought.

#B2BSales #ThoughtLeadership #SalesCulture #ProfessionalIdentity #LinkedInCulture