For our journals this week, we were asked to comment on Jool’s statement ;
“The essential point of networking is human contact. Business has killed networking by making it something for the career orientated person.”
Personally, I’d disagree with this statement. Whilst networking is obviously an essential part of business, it allows companies to expand their reach and for individuals working in business to find and meet more people, I think networking can exist outside of business altogether and for many more reasons than purely financial gain. For example, during fresher’s week at university, students visit bars, clubs, etc. in order to meet new people and therefore gain more from their experience at university in a new city. This in itself could be called networking, even though it yields no monetary rewards (it’s probably actually quite damaging for the bank account, along with the liver), but it’s a prime opportunity to meet new friends and gain more life experiences. This style of social networking may not be as efficient, precise or structured as the kind employed by a business, but it still works very well and it is used by thousands of people who’d never even think of referring to it as ‘networking’.
Sometimes these more social networks can be born out of business like situations, but even still it’s hard to class them as ‘career orientated’. Take things like thriving underground music cultures, particularly evident in the rave scene, communities of people drawn together out of a passion for music and a desire to stage events for people with a similar outlook. The existence of many successful underground dance events owes everything to a dedicated network, and whilst there may be some nice little earners along the way, this isn’t the main incentive or point to organising such an event. It’s the same for many other diverse interests too, like the booming underground metal scene of the late 80’s, built up by many passionate individuals who circulated and traded tapes they’d made of bands who didn’t always have record company backing (appropriately referred to as the ‘tape-trading’ scene). This wasn’t at all business minded, it would have cost a fresh faced tape trader the price of a tape, envelope and stamp to send their bundle of riffs to another like-minded music fan somewhere else across the globe, with only the promise of someone else’s compilation swinging by their way in the near future to show for it (which sounds worth it to me, to be honest!). This stands as a prime example of a thriving, non-career centred network.
I can fully understand the need for networking within a business environment and the important results it can yield, but I don’t think human contact is necessarily driven by, nor relies on financial gain or the need to further one’s own career.
