Except that the contexts these days are so wide as to overlap a lot of the time, hence the clarity and focus of the meaning is diffused. Everybody knows what we mean by ‘network’ — but not many people have a clear and precise definition. It’s one of those words which we see and nod and say to ourselves “yep, networking – I know what that is”. I usually find that if a person can’t clearly explain something to someone else (let’s say, to a Martian that’s just landed) then that person probably doesn’t actually know it at all — they merely think they do.
In the case of networks this is of course an easy illusion — we’re all on the Internet, we know that’s a network, we therefore know what a network is. Those in jobs might have a desk with computer on with a Cat5 cable coming out the back of it and off into a mysterious hole in the skirting board. Equally mysterious people come round to fix your network and tell you why stuff can’t be installed on the computer.
Even before the Internet people have been saying that business is all about ‘networking’. Okay, I’ll bring the Cat5 cable. Oh, not that sort of networking. What then? I need to ‘hook up’ with other people face to face, to “network” with them. Much time was spent in uncomfortable rooms in offices, trying to be well-behaved and impressive to strangers, forcing the act of ‘networking’ to happen so you could say you’ve ‘networked’. Even more time was spent in restaurants and rather comfortable pubs, also apparently ‘networking’.
Networking in the business context is simply turning up face to face where there are others that have also turned up? Networking is simply turning up? Is that the driver behind that manic willy-waving contest of arranging networking meetings to compel one to turn up even earlier than sanely comfortable and pretending that it’s normal and that we’re not only awake but somehow productive as a result?
Networks are very interesting in ways which most of us are not thinking of when we think of networking. For example, in 1736, Leonard Euler drew an interesting diagram, of bridges. I won’t go into it here, that link explains the background. The resulting diagram forms a chart or “graph”, which has blobby nodes and connecting arrows on. The node we would come to call a “vertex”, the arrow would become known as an “edge”, so graph theory is all about edges and vertexes (okay, “vertices” if we have time to be grammatically correct). If a vertex has more than one edge touching it — in other words, if a node has more than one arrow connecting to it — then we refer to that number as the number of “degrees” that node has.
That’s where the idea of “Six Degrees of Separation” comes from, by the way. The exact number of six is not necessarily true – it depends on the particular population, not the whole world in one go. But it’s kind of true enough to give us the understanding of social connectivity we see in Twitter, Linked-in etc. You might be connected to me. I might be connected to a bunch of other people. Each of those may in turn be connected to other groups of people. Someone in one of those groups might also be connected to me somehow. It happens. These first-degree, second-degree and even third-degree connections are quite close to us.
One of the problems with having a tight, regular and uniform networking group, especially all first and second degree connections, is that news spreads rapidly and if anything happens, everyone in the immediate degrees of your group get to know about it all pretty quickly. This might seem good, but the downside of everyone knowing what everyone else knows is that there’s less opportunity for variation. There’s less likelihood of individual thinking in solutions, and less actual opportunity availability— less than you’d think. I’ll explain this in a later post.
However, not many people would dispute that if you want success, you’re not going to find it by yourself. You’ve got to get out and get with other people. Success does not open your door and walk into your living room, getting in the way of the television as it passes in front. You get out and go to it. That’s why we all prize the idea of networking, because of the perceived value it can offer. I just wish more people knew in detail what they mean by networking when they talk about it. It’s far from intuitive.
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