{"id":446,"date":"2009-01-27T00:37:21","date_gmt":"2009-01-27T00:37:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2009\/01\/27\/on_the_nature_of_networking_reprise\/"},"modified":"2009-01-27T00:37:21","modified_gmt":"2009-01-27T00:37:21","slug":"on_the_nature_of_networking_reprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2009\/01\/27\/on_the_nature_of_networking_reprise\/","title":{"rendered":"On the nature of networking: reprise"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a move that surprised me as much as anyone, my entry last year on Networking<\/a> made it into the OpenLab<\/a> anthology, at the expense of the far superior Stardust<\/a>. You’ll be happy to hear that I didn’t abuse my Deputy Editorial privilege and overrule the judges’ decision, but I do have another plan up my sleeve for that particular entry…<\/p>\n

\nAnyway. Last year I talked about the growing plethora (_can you have a ‘growing plethora’?_\u2014Ed.) of networking sites, and wondered if any of them\u2014and by implication scientific networking itself\u2014were working. And if not, was it worth trying to make it work?<\/p>\n

\nA bunch of you folks have been away at ScienceOnline’09<\/a> (and what it is it with the word ‘unconference’? Surely a conference with no agenda fixed in advance is still a conference? Just a badly-organized one…) and have come back full of beans and happy as happy things. Which is neat, but… well, you’ll see. I’ve already noted<\/a> that Jonathan Gitlin<\/a> thinks that _science social networking sites are hopeless and useless_\u2014a conclusion he’d reached<\/a> before<\/a> he went to ScienceOnline’09. And it appears that the conference has not changed his mind, in fact it seems to have strengthened<\/a> his conclusion:<\/p>\n

\nAs it turns out, the moderators, Cameron Neylon<\/a> and Deepak Singh<\/a>, had about as little time for these platforms as I did, and we weren’t alone. I was frankly horrified at one of their slides, which was filled with the URLs to social networking sites aimed at scientists\u2014I thought there were a just few out there, but they’re numbering in the hundreds!\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nAnd yet just about all of them suffer from the same problem: not enough users and nothing to make them inherently better than the established players in the market, like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Nature Networks.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nLet’s ignore the back-patting that is likely to come of being ranked alongside Facebook and Linkedin, by an Ars Technica writer no less, and think, for a moment, why this might be so. <\/p>\n

\nJonathan says that the other sites don’t have enough users, and don’t have a unique selling point. But you’d have thought (well, I would, but what do I know?) that such problems would be easy enough to overcome, especially if you’ve got VC money to pour into the marketing tank. Various suggestions were made in the comments<\/a>, and David Crotty wrote an exceedingly long post<\/a> about what’s preventing uptake of these tools.<\/p>\n

\nPart of it is that tracking multiple, simultaneous conversations across different platforms (Twitter, Facebook, blogs &c.) is not straightforward, although that might be amenable to a technological solution, but I think the real problem is deeper, more fundamental. Martin<\/a> said,<\/p>\n

\nI forgot that virtual networking is much more important if you don\u2019t live in Central Europe or on the United States East Coast. I can be in London, Munich or Paris within two hours and without spending too much money, but that is obviously different when you live in Sydney or Cape Town.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nand while I think he’s right to an extent, I really don’t think that virtual networking is ever going to take off in that way (until the oil runs out\/air travel becomes too expensive\u2014and even then we might simply find different circles to move in). <\/p>\n

\nI was talking, at the weekend, to a medic friend who has to give a talk at a conference next week. He hates giving talks and I offered to do it for him. I reckoned I could bullshit my way out of any awkward questions (hey, it’s only medicine<\/em> after all), and then he said that he was only going because he had to give that talk. There weren’t any other sessions he wanted to attend.<\/p>\n

\nAnd then it struck me. Humans (including scientists) are social creatures. The main point of conferences (with the possible exception of Gordon Conferences) is not<\/em> to exchange information. The main point of conferences is to socialize. To get to know people\u2014and not in the measured, manicured, mannered<\/em> way that scientific social networking sites facilitate. We want to catch people unguarded, after a few beers, away from their home turf: we want to find out what we’re really like.<\/p>\n

\nWe can’t do that virtually. Nature Network, as fun (and useful, maybe) as it is, is no substitute for meeting people in real life. How many of us, having met only virtually, were completely stoked<\/em> to finally meet each other in London<\/a>?<\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\nYou can’t have a virtual martini. We are made to interact in the flesh, and any attempt to take that away\u2014any social networking site that doesn’t have its roots in a real-life experience (or at least the potential<\/em> of such)\u2014is, ultimately, doomed to failure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a move that surprised me as much as anyone, my entry last year on Networking made it into the OpenLab anthology, at the expense of the far superior Stardust. You’ll be happy to hear that I didn’t abuse my … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}