I am sick and tired of hearing about the benefits of networking, especially “social networking.” Rather than networking, I feel the better term for what people are actually doing in this regard is instead “work-netting.” No one has explored this term yet, apparently. So, since I’m on the ground floor of this breakthrough in the understanding of human communications, let me illuminate you. 

What people taught me as “networking” always felt more to me like dragging a net than creating any sort of actual network. You’re fishing more so than connecting. Yes, you can use social networks to create traditional sorts of connections, but most people don’t do that. You spend all your time “following” people and commenting on their textual and photographic diarrhea just to participate in a sort of knitting circle.

Yes, what most of you are doing right now on your In Links and Book Faces and X-marks-the-spotting is work-netting, not networking. The reality of Social Networking is all a bold-faced lie created to generate advertising revenue and to keep people from doing other more productive things like having actual conversations at coffee shops, reading books, and attending to personal hygiene. 

Now, I’m not at all saying that social networks or supposed networking events are actually bad things in and of themselves. They all start with good intentions, but they then devolve into accentuating the growing tribalism and clique-generation in our world society. These things always existed, of course, but we should be coming together as one humanity, not specializing ourselves in even more tight-knit cult-like social groupings. 

Basically, what we think of today as networking is not getting to know the right people. That was actual networking. But these days, more often than not, you’re actually going out fishing and getting to know the wrong people who you then mistake for the right people and get washed out to sea never to find your way home again.  

~ Amelia Desertsong