Networking NoHow

Professional talk today is all about networking. Plug in and presto! You are live! A vibrant node slotted neatly into a living network connecting throbbing Billions, and it’s all out there for you. Instant accessibility to the world. An e-mail away from the President. A LinkedIn pulse point to a book deal. Just one XING short of getting your play on Broadway. A tweet shy of a global following, glory, and hallelujah.

I’ve never heard anyone talk about how to do it though. Networking, that is. I suppose it’s considered a given. We were born to network, no? Sadly, it has become one more proof point that I was born in the wrong age. Because, you see, I do not know how to network. Socializing one-oh-one—office parties and church functions—makes me edgy. I am shy. And awkward if I have to say something.

One of the most intimate and difficult questions I find myself faced with, usually from strangers—and this is how things start out—is, How are you? I falter, overwhelmed by the amount of information I must divulge to satisfy that innocent query until I realize that if I say ‘Fine,’ the conversation will tick along like magic. But pronouncing that word means starting the chat off with so gross a misrepresentation of myself that I feel compelled to clarify to some degree how I really am. This strains my rhetorical skills, because I don’t want to go into too much detail, yet feel bound to be honest. As I engage in the effort of achieving a brief, but true—but also cheery, if possible, without tainting the true—snapshot of the state of my being, I notice my interlocutor is looking around for something a little sexier. This extinguishes the slender chance there ever had been for a lively chat over bubbly and cake. My perception of my capacity for engaging in socializing one-oh-one takes another hit. Any chance for promotion through that networking op, had there been any, recedes into shades of Hades.

But networking—all those cables, Wi-Fi channels, IP addresses—strips us of the messy necessities human gab requires and gets us right to the point: Give me that book contract. I’ll take the CEO job. Let me sing God Bless America at the Astrodome. That five million should be coming my way, a little from each of you; you’ll never know it’s gone. Just plug in properly, network like it was meant to be done, and it can all be yours.

But what new handshakes must be mastered in order to establish the confidence required to initiate a meaningful exchange in this new medium? In wondering thus, you wonder wrong. It’s not a meaningful exchange. Meaningful exchange cannot be piped through all those cables, secure sockets, and Wi-Fi channels. And it’s not an exchange. It’s a one-way deal. Observe the Twitter phenomenon. You tweet, wires sing, followers hark, you glow. (One does have to admit a similarity to the Muslim veil: I can tweet you; you can’t tweet me.) Okay. Of course. You concur. You submit. You acquiesce, open yourself and brace for all that one-way technology to come gushing in. All you want to know is: How can you get some of that gushing the other way? How do you get millions of followers on Twitter when you have exactly none now? Discarding the ignominious (most obvious, demeaning, and reprehensible) alternative of asking people to follow you, maybe you could insert one of those hash things directly in front, no space, of say GeorgeHarrison, no space, and get your tweet listed when die-hard fans search for the deceased Beatle? Yes! You show up! They see you. They may read your tweet. Some are bound to love you. (The “no accounting for taste” principle plays its hand to enormous advantage for you in gargantuan gambles.) They’ll re-tweet you. They’ll follow you. Open up those super-cooled, titanium-blue, one-way pearly gates. I’m a winging through.

Last week I took the plunge: I decided to network. I actually said to myself, go ahead and e-mail that very interesting professional. Ask for a time slot to chat live. Find out what they’re doing. Let them know you are alive. Make contact. Ping out through the Ethernet to them them them. Yes! I will do it. I will network. And I did. Sent the e-mail, I mean. Sure enough, in a few days I received an e-mail back with something I hadn’t anticipated. The person said no. Indeed. The world is a funny place. Some people plug in, turn on, and win enthusiastic followers. I stick out my face and get it stuck in the mud.

This was not my first networking rebuff. Years before, I had attempted to make contact with the project leader I had worked for just before my contract ran out. Why did I attempt to make contact? Because I liked working with that person, very much, in fact. Never in my life did I go to more trouble trying to contact someone. It ended not just in defeat, but in a charitable decision on my part to stop pestering a person who obviously was as persistent in evading my calls, ignoring my e-mails, and erasing my voice mail messages as I was in extending them. I know this person is well and thriving professionally: I found the eponymous Web site, and a picture. Oh, it’s that person all right. Right there and perfectly inaccessible.

Of course, the greatest networking defeat of all time was my unhappy inauguration into the chaotic dice game: my virtual joust with the publishing industry. It was a real-life fairy tale in which little David loses. Yes, do the networking thing with a literary agent for a while and you will find out how insubstantial your networking impact is. You will gain some distinguishing gray hairs for yourself and a demeanor—if you happen to take impersonal rejections personally—that will keep people away at office parties, so it won’t all be for nothing. Nobody will ask how you are anymore. They won’t need to. Nor do they want to hear why not, so you’re left in peace. And suddenly it’s you approaching with a sly How are we? and that pesky interlocuter casting rueful sidelong glances.

None of which is to say that the Web isn’t a great medium for those who know how to navigate it. But let’s not beg the question. How do we novices get started? Give us an idea. Of what consistency is this medium? Does it have trapezes? Do you swing from node to node? Should we yodel as we go? Or are we to paddle our little boats through one stroke at a time? And if so, should we prepare for a Drake Passage? Or is this body more like the fat circus lady who sings after all?

Alas and alack, what none of us network neophytes yet realize is the nature of this net, perhaps because it’s so obvious: a ubiquitous giant retina operated by massive companies who are the real networking experts. Signals hum through cables and air waves and stream out of electronic devices to flood your eyes and ears and brain in order to ping you. Incessantly. And you ping back. That’s the catch. You are a human being. You can’t help it. It collects those pings and carefully, as if they were drops of blood, dispenses them to individualized vials. Why does it do this? The stooping conqueror is preparing marketing blasts tailored just for you. They will reach you, anytime, anywhere, and have one thing in common: your weight in gold. It does not gorge. It does not get full. It does not get enough. It will take all. It will accept payment in installments.

So remember one thing, latecomer, as you enter the networking game: It is no longer about you accessing anything. The playing field is of a size you cannot imagine, and on that field is an opponent of a nature and appetite you cannot begin to conceive. It is cold, it is cruel, and it is waiting, most intelligently, for you to plug in. And as soon as you do, you’re in for a gutting you won’t see coming. So, network away. Ping your heart out. Tweet your legions of followers. Have fun, if you can. Life is short. Expect, however, nothing but tolls along the way.