Social Networking - Is This All There Is? Part 2 - Why Do We Network?

Why do we network?

In the first article in this series, I asked the question of social networking "Is this it"? Citing the widespread individual and largely retail and media driven use of networks and their entire absence amongst large parts of web savvy people as well as almost all business-to-business and back-office operations. I likened this state of affairs to the early PC market - brought to popularity by "Gaming", but not really exploited and matured until business took a hold, shaped and developed the platform and made it powerful.

In the second of this series of articles "Social media - is this all there is?" I am going to look at the basic human need to network irrespective of real-world or digital media - so that future articles can then identify whether these basic needs - and evolutionary possibilities that drove them - are being met in digital media and where we could possibly go from here. Is what we have all there is? Can we not do so much more?

So why network?

In terms of basic human requirement - our need for social networking and "Buzz" is the same in the real-world as in the Digital. The survival drive that pushes children develop socially (i.e. network) exists for 3 principal reasons:

a) To manage uncertainty about the world in a safe environment so they progressively learn about it - i.e. gain perspective - using the intelligence of others;

b) To learn about themselves and confirm how they relate to other people: who they can "trust", who they should avoid;

c) To strengthen and leverage their communications abilities so they can progress within the world themselves, expand the survivability of the pack, and in turn hand down their knowledge to others.

Now, Social Psychology tells us that a child does not arrive into the world with a pre-built cognitive map of how to network. A child arrives into a group predominantly with its own range of instincts and desires, little initial concern for the feelings and desires of others and tendency towards seeking instant gratification. This childish behaviour is only influenced - i.e. the full objective and benefits of networking are only realised - with group and parental feedback in the form of:

· Providing a "centre of influence" - an influential "centre of gravity" in the group - a role model group members can aspire to follow and emulate. Critically a relationship of trust has to be forged. This is not a relationship of power and control, although that usually develops in parent/child relationships. The primary bond is one of trust;

· Learning how they can adopt roles to achieve an objective and learning how their actions can have influence on their environment - with children this is usually achieved through role-playing games;

· Learning about give and take and taking turns to achieve an objective - again with children usually achieved by games-playing;

· Introduction to an ever-widening circle of acquaintances against whom the children can compare and contrast themselves.

Children learn about networking via credible authority plus this positive introduction to an ever widening group of peers and superiors- because eventually they become introduced to a group of subordinates to whom in evolutionary terms, it behoves them also to be benign, fraternal, guiding, challenging. It is perfectly possible in the absence of these guiding behaviours, for a child to remain immature, self-serving, introverted: to give nothing, take what it can, and pass on nothing.

As it is with the individual child, so it is with the wider group. Without credible (trustworthy) governance and a wider perspective of the world outside it, a group - like an individual - remains childish and self-centred: its own instincts and desires start to represent - not the average of opinions available in the group - but the sum of all biases in a particular direction. Without credible governance and external perspective, the group develops a "self-righteousness" in its own beliefs, with little concern for the feelings and desires of other groups, with all biases tending towards gratification of those beliefs.

Whilst networking of course also occurs within such closed groups, without external perspective, those groups become "parochial". They fail to see - or test for - contrary or alternative information that maintains the "health" or wider-perspective of the group. This has huge implications on survivability because it is counter-evolutionary: it's not the way nature has forced us over millenia. Introversion in a group is not a natural state of affairs. Networking is the safeguard - if you will - that as well as showing us where new food sources could be found, was also there to stop us inter-breeding: a catastrophe for survivability.

Studies of many social animals that can network over huge distances and beyond their immediate physical group - for example Dolphins, or Killer Wales - reinforce this fact that there is a group benefit from networking that is greater than the sum of the individuals involved. With so many eyes watching and so many ears listening, plus this group connectivity that can span huge distances, networking ensures the very survival of the species - not because it homogenises all the groups and spreads a single message - but because it promotes intelligence of the environment; fosters choice, and therefore diversity, and therefore the flexibility essential for long-term survival. As the GM Car executive whose company moved from Detroit to Los Angeles observed: "pulling up at the traffic lights in LA and seeing all these Japanese and European cars beside me - made me realise what competition meant!"

In Sum: successful networking for an individual or group is an episode where:

· Valuable information is sought and given;

· Both sender and giver learn about each other - "roles" are established or reinforced; "give and take" has occurred; trust as opposed to control is established;

· The group as a whole benefits from the interaction - in as much as that information is either used directly, or passed-on;

· External references are checked - even if this is just an act of welcoming a stranger - so the message and orientation of the group as a whole remains open or "healthy";

· A check-and-control function has implicitly or explicitly occurred - in which the validities of all parties are ascertained and reinforced; the validity of the information is ascertained & reinforced and the cohesion of the group is ascertained and reinforced.

Unsuccessful networking is the antithesis of the above: information exchanged is valueless; sender and giver are none the wiser about the characteristics of the other; there is no benefit to the "network" of related participants and no implicit check and control of information being passed or of the credibility of participants and there is no wider-world information available to keep the group "healthy". This sort of networking is "noise".

I hope the above gives you a good feel for the criticality of networking for individual and group development, and the characteristics required for networking to be successful versus unsuccessful. So to bring things back to my agenda: why should we need to understand the psychology of networking when looking at Social media? Because we now have tools that like no time before, enable far greater reach in the size and distribution of our messages, enable greater velocity of circulation and enable greater frequency of messaging. But if, at the end of the day, all the digital networks do is to act as "volumisers" in the act of communication, neither fostering nor detracting from what makes a strong network or a weak one, then this is a huge opportunity lost. We are left with platforms which are evolution-agnostic: being capable of producing an Arab Spring, but also a London Riot, and otherwise just a lot of noise. Is that all they can offer?

Or are we just lacking that "Gestalt" that says: with better tests for credibility; better ability to assess, place and give trust in one-another; better leverage of message content in terms of knowledge capture, sustaining and disseminating high-quality conversations, ability to coordinate and manage "tasks" that become apparent from the conversation; better correlation to other sources of similar knowledge, better ability to assess alternative or contrary views, better review and approval (which equally means dis-approval - where did the "thumbs down" go?) that the social networks actually represent a behavioural, knowledge-promoting and evolutionary breakthrough for the human race. Should that not excite us?

Is this all there is? Is there a possibility of that social networks - if altered to promote what evolution has implicitly shown us for Milena - would allow digital communications far to outstrip real-world networking - by showing that "open doors" are better than "closed" ones? If so, what characteristics would those be and how would the networks leverage them? Are there behavioural changes we may need to consider ourselves in order to use such tools?

In the next article, I shall review digital and real world networking to examine the strengths and weaknesses of both in relation to these evolutionary "needs" so we can determine where we could go from here - or whether "this is indeed it".