We have to admit: We find it cute when older people who aren’t as up-to-date on new technology as we are get befuddled by the myriad of trends and memes in cyberspace. That’s even true when the person in question is former secretary of state and current presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, as newly released emails show that at different times she was befuddled by both LinkedIn and emoji.
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Let’s start with the emoji discussion, as flagged by Business Insider. It seems that Hillary in 2012 decided to revert to using an older BlackBerry model that didn’t have the latest version of the software. The downside to this, however, was that emoji characters would no longer appear in her messages whenever she typed a smiley face icon. She described herself as “quite bereft that I’ve lost the emoticons from my latest new old berry.”
Senior Clinton adviser Philippe Reines responded by explaining that she’d have to bite the bullet and get a newer model to get her favorite emoji back:
Our second tech-related Hillary email, also flagged by Business Insider, shows Clinton forwarded a LinkedIn request to two aides and asked them what she was supposed to do with it.
“It is a social networking site where you create a profile and post an online version of your resume,” replied aide Robert Russo. “Former and current colleagues and employers have the opportunity to write positive things about your work, all in the hope that it can be used to find a future job. The network you create is with friends, but your profile is available to the public.”
We’ll assume that Clinton never actually made her own LinkedIn profile, but we have to say that having her as one of your LinkedIn connections probably couldn’t hurt your job prospects.
