Subject: RISKS DIGEST 15.12 REPLY-TO: risks@csl.sri.com RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest Thursday 14 October 1993 Volume 15 : Issue 12 FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator Contents: Networking on the Network (Phil Agre) [long] The RISKS Forum is a moderated digest discussing risks; comp.risks is its USENET counterpart. Undigestifiers are available throughout the Internet, but not from RISKS. Contributions should be relevant, sound, in good taste, objective, cogent, coherent, concise, and nonrepetitious. Diversity is welcome. CONTRIBUTIONS to risks@csl.sri.com, with appropriate, substantive "Subject:" line. Others may be ignored! Contributions will not be ACKed. The load is too great. **PLEASE** INCLUDE YOUR NAME & INTERNET FROM: ADDRESS, especially .UUCP folks. PLEASE SEND REQUESTS FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, archive problems, and other information to risks-request@csl.sri.com (not automated). 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Relevant contributions may appear in the RISKS section of regular issues of ACM SIGSOFT's SOFTWARE ENGINEERING NOTES, unless you state otherwise. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1993 17:57:14 -0700 From: pagre@weber.ucsd.edu (Phil Agre) Subject: Networking on the Network The following article (about 6300 words and 40kB) is a how-to for research people who are learning to use the Internet as part of their professional networking. It has two goals, practical and philosophical: Its practical goal is to give new users a structured way of thinking about e-mail as part of everyday life. It warns against some of the more common risks of indiscriminate e-mail use, and it offers some specific formulas for approaching common situations. Its philosophical goal is to cast doubt on the idea of "virtual communities" and "cyberspaces" that are supposed to exist in a different dimension from the rest of our lives. To the contrary, I think we should learn to view electronic communications as part of a larger ecology of communication media and community-building processes. That's not to say that e-mail has no revolutionary potentials; quite the contrary, it is to emphasize that real revolutions can be made, and can *only* be made, as the article says, "down here on earth, amidst your actual relationships with actual people, and not in an abstract technological head-space." "Networking on the network" is also an experiment in Internet publishing. I don't get any credit for it at tenure time, but I do get to keep revising it forever, based on the comments I receive from people all over the net. At any given time the current version can be fetched by sending an e-mail message like so: To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: archive send network So please do send me any comments you might have. I'm especially hoping to get comments from students in classes (of which there are several already) in which "Networking on the network" is assigned as a reading. Phil Agre, UCSD - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - NETWORKING ON THE NETWORK Phil Agre Department of Communication D-003 University of California, San Diego La Jolla, California 92093-0503 pagre@ucsd.edu Version of 21 September 1993. Copyright 1993 by the author. You may forward these notes electronically to anyone for any non-commercial purpose. Please send me any comments that might help to improve future versions. The Internet and other digital networks are currently undergoing explosive growth. Several million people employ electronic mail for some significant portion of their professional communications. Yet in my experience few people have figured out how to use the net productively. A great deal of effort is being put into technical means for finding information resources on the net, but hardly anybody has been helping newcomers figure out where the net fits in the larger picture of their own careers. These notes are a first crude attempt to fill that gap, building on the most successful practices I've observed in my fifteen years on the net. Although I will focus on the use of electronic communication in research communities, the underlying principles will be applicable to many other communities as well. Everyone's life is different, cultures and disciplines have their own conventions, and it's all just my opinion anyway, but perhaps my suggestions will be useful. Do not interpret them as a set of rules or a manual of etiquette or morality, but rather as a resource in figuring out your own personal way of getting around in your particular professional world. And definitely do not turn them into any kind of ersatz social identity or value system. Instead, make sense of them within some larger set of values that you develop as you live your life. The first thing to realize is that net-world is part of reality. The people you correspond with on the network are real people with lives and careers and habits and feelings of their own. Things you say on the net can make you friends or enemies, famous or notorious, included or ostracized, respected or scorned. You need to take the electronic part of your life seriously. In particular, you need to think about and consciously choose how you wish to use the network. Regard electronic mail as part of a larger ecology of communication media and genres: telephone, archival journals and newsletters, professional meetings, paper mail, voice mail, chatting in the hallway, lectures and colloquia, job interviews, visits to other research sites, and so forth, each with its own attributes and strengths. The relationships among media will probably change and new genres will probably emerge as the technologies evolve, but make sure that you don't harbor the all-too-common fantasy that someday we will live our lives entirely through electronic channels. It's not true. One might engage in many different professional activities over the net: sharing raw data, arguing about technical standards, collaborating on research projects, commenting on drafts of papers, editing journals, planning meetings and trips, and so on. Underlying all of these disparate activities, though, is the activity of building and maintaining professional relationships. All of the capacity and velocity of electronic communication is wasted unless we use it to seek out, cultivate, and nurture relationships with other human beings. Unfortunately the existing mechanisms for electronic interactions, by seeming to reduce people to abstractions and codes (like "c2nxq@loco.thrust.com"), make it difficult to keep this deeper dimension of interaction in mind. Still, there's no escaping it: if you aren't consciously building relationships, you're probably getting lost. At the most fundamental level, then, most of my advice has nothing intrinsically to do with electronic communication at all. My real topic is not (technological) networks but (professional) networking. Therefore I'll discuss networking in a general way before describing how electronic mail can accelerate it. In the past, the only ways to learn networking were to be born to a socially well-connected family or to apprentice yourself to a master of the art. And even though the term "networking" became fashionable during the 1980's, it is only recently that decent books on the subject have begun to appear. (Some of these are listed in the appendix.) Many people resist the idea of networking because they associate it with the greasy connotations of "knowing the right people", because of a distaste for "politics", because they've learned that useful knowledge about how the world works is necessarily "cynical", or because it supposedly takes time away from "getting real work done". Even when the practical skills of networking are explicitly taught, it is usually done over coffee or beer, in hushed tones, as if there were something illicit about it. Indeed, many people will accuse you of all sorts of terrible things if you admit to having worked-out ideas on the subject. I couldn't disagree more. The truth is that the world is made of people. People out of communities are like fish out of water or plants out of soil. Research of all kinds depends critically on intensive and continually evolving communication among people engaged in related projects. Networking cannot substitute for good research, but good research cannot substitute for networking either. You can't get a job or a grant or any recognition for your accomplishments unless you keep up to date with the people in your community. Establishing professional relationships with particular people and involving yourself in particular professional communities will change you: not only will you internalize a variety of interesting points of view, but you will become more comfortable in your writing and speaking because you will be engaged in an ongoing conversation with people you know. And if no community is waiting for you, you will have to go out and build one -- one person at a time. This "overhead" can be a nuisance at first, but none of it is terribly difficult once you get some practice and really convince yourself that you cannot sustain your professional life without devoting about a day per week to it. Here, then, are some of the fundamentals of professional networking. They will sound cumbersome and abstract. You'll be able to skip some of the steps as you get established in your field (or if, unlike most of us, you are able to charm rooms full of strangers in twenty minutes), but if you're starting from zero then the process really is this complicated: (1) Know your goals. Getting tenure? Being invited to conferences in Europe? Filling your life with intelligent conversation? Developing leadership skills? Clear goals will help you maintain focus. Do not, however, use your professional networking to achieve personal goals such as finding friends and lovers. It's just great when professional relationships happen to develop into personal relationships (assuming that you're clear about the conflicts of interest that professional power differences can bring), but always keep in mind that professional relationships and friendships are different sorts of things, no matter how friendly they might seem on the surface. (2) Identify some relevant people. Awful as it might sound, "relevance" here is reckoned in functional terms: given how your particular professional world operates, with whom do you have a mutual interest in making contact? In the world of research, mutual interest is almost always defined through the content of your research: you wish to contact people whose research bears some important relationship to yours. This is the case I will assume here. How do you identify these people? Most of the methods are wholly mundane: asking people with good networks, chance mentions of people in conversation, and habitually scanning bibliographies, abstracts, and conference proceedings. Get used to these mundane practices before you explore anything fancier. (3) Court these people individually. The right way to do this is not entirely obvious. Unless you are already well known in the person's field, you should NOT simply approach them and say, "hey, I hear you're interested in XXX". The reason for this is profound, viz, whereas ordinary social life calls on you to simply be yourself in this way, professional life calls on you to construct and maintain a complex professional persona that is composed largely of your research, writing, and professional activities. Therefore, in approaching possible professional contacts, you should let your research articles be your emissaries. (If you haven't written anything yet, let your networking wait until you have. Unpublished articles, conference papers, and research reports are all okay. In writing your first articles, you will want to lean heavily on your local system of advisors, mentors, and peers; the skills involved in this process are a subject for another time.) Here is the procedure: (a) choose someone you wish to approach; (b) make sure that your article cites that person's work in some substantial way (in addition to all your other citations); (c) mail the person a copy of your article; and (d) include a low-key, one-page cover letter that says something intelligent about their work. If your work and theirs could be seen to overlap, include a concise statement of the relationship you see between them. The tone of this letter counts. Project ordinary self-confidence. Refrain from praising or fawning or self-deprecating or making a big deal out of it. And don't drop dead if you don't get a reply right away. Anybody who isn't wholly egotistical or seriously famous will appreciate your taking the trouble to write them. In my experience, most everyone in the world of research is desperate for someone to actually understand what they're saying. If they don't reply, the most likely reason is laziness. (Warning: Do not use citations as a form of flattery. This sort of thing fools nobody. Instead, think of a research paper as a kind of open letter, with the people you cite included in its addressees. Research is a conversation, and your paper is a way of starting new conversations with people in your area. When in doubt, get advice.) (4) Meet this person face-to-face at a professional meeting. Unless you really know what you're doing, you should keep the conversation to safe, professional topics. Ask them intelligent questions about their work. Ask them about the people they work with. Figure out who you know (that is, professionally) in common. If other people, projects, or laboratories come up in the conversation, say whatever positive things you honestly have to say about them -- avoid criticism and negativity. If the person is significantly more powerful than you then the prospect of this conversation will probably make you uneasy. That's okay. Concentrate on meeting people who don't intimidate you and your courage will grow. Your single most important audience is actually not the power-holders of your field but rather the best people of your own generation. These people share your situation and will usually be happy to talk to you. Nonetheless, you should always give full and respectful attention to anybody who approaches you, no matter how junior or marginal they might be. If you find yourself talking to a space cadet or a jerk, have compassion. It's up to you which relationships to pursue in depth, but everyone you meet shapes your reputation -- and justly so. It really is imperative that you conduct your professional activities ethically -- and not just within the bounds of a legalistic interpretation of ethical principles, but with an active and creative solicitude for the well-being of the individuals and communities around you. You don't have to be shy or let people walk on you, but if you get ahead at the expense of others then it will catch up with you -- in your heart if not immediately in your paycheck. (5) The next step, I'm afraid, depends on the hierarchy. If someone is qualitatively more senior than you, your goal is simply to get on their radar screen -- one chat per year is plenty. (That's mostly because they already have a full network and have begun to reckon relevance differently from you.) If someone is more or less equal to you in the hierarchy, and if they still strike you as relevant, worthwhile, and trustworthy, it will probably be time to exchange pre-publication drafts of new articles. Again, keep it low-key: pass along a draft that you're ready to circulate and invite "any comments you might have". Upon receiving such a draft yourself, take the trouble to write out a set of comments on it. Make sure your comments are intelligent, thoughtful, constructive, and useful. If you are uncomfortable writing critical comments, frame them with positive comments ("this is obviously an important topic and you've made some valuable observations"), develop a lexicon of hedges ("I'm not clear on ...", "maybe"), emphasize what's possible instead of what's wrong ("maybe you can build on this by ...", "perhaps you can further clarify this by ..."), and keep to specifics ("how does this step follow?" as opposed to "woolly and vague"). This draft-exchanging ritual is tremendously important, but nobody ever seems to teach you how it's done. When in doubt, ask for help. And if somebody comments a draft for you, thank them and be certain to reciprocate (and don't forget to include them in the acknowledgements section of the finished paper). Doing so, even once, will almost certainly cement a long-term professional relationship -- a new member of your network. (6) Follow up. Keep coming up with simple ways to be useful to the people in your network. A few times a year is plenty. Pass things along to them. Mention their work to other people. Plug them in your talks. Include them in things. Get your department or laboratory to invite them to speak. Put them up when they come to town. And invent other helpful things to do that nobody ever thought of before. None of this is mandatory, of course, but it helps. And I can't repeat this often enough: keep it low-key. Never, ever pressure anybody into anything. Never heap so much unsolicited help on someone that they feel crowded or obligated. Don't complain. And furthermore, make sure you're doing all this stuff from courtesy and respect, and not as any kind of phony politicking -- people can spot phonies a mile off. Build relationships with personal friends outside of work so you won't be unconsciously trying to get professional contacts to play roles in your personal life (for example, the role of sounding board for your troubles). If you don't hear from someone for a while, let it ride. If you feel yourself getting obsessive about the process, go talk it out with someone you regard as wise. This step-by-step procedure is obviously oversimplified and somewhat rigid. And it omits many topics, such as the claims that effective networking makes on numerous other activities: giving talks, mixing at receptions, formulating research results, choosing where and when to publish, organizing workshops and journal issues, and so forth. Nonetheless, some basic points about the networking process should be clear enough: * It takes time -- you have to be patient and let it happen. * It focuses on particular individuals and particular relationships. * It produces bonds of reciprocal obligation through the exchange of favors. * It calls for a significant but manageable up-front investment. * It requires you to cultivate a realistic awareness of power. * It involves a variety of communication media. * It forces you to develop communication skills in each of these media. These statements, of course, aren't etched in stone. You should keep reflecting on your professional life as you go along, continually trying to come up with a better way of explaining it to yourself. No doubt I've left out some important dimensions of the process. Having surveyed the basics of networking and professional relationships, it's time to consider the role that electronic communication can play. The most important thing is to employ electronic media consciously and deliberately as part of a larger strategy for your career. It's okay to use the net in other parts of your life: hunting for people to correspond with, organizing political movements, joining discussions of sex and child-rearing, and so forth. But so long as you have your professional hat on, every message you exchange on the network should be part of the process of finding, building, and maintaining professional relationships. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough, because electronic mail seems to provide endless temptations to the contrary. I succumb to these temptations regularly, and I invariably regret it. They include: * The temptation to react. Most on-line discussion groups consist largely of people reacting to things they've seen, acting on impulse without thinking through their own agenda in the situation. (One kind of reacting is called "flaming", but many other kinds of reacting are equally insidious.) E-mail encourages this kind of reactive behavior by making it easy to respond to a discussion with only a few rapid keystrokes. Keep your cool. The more impulsive you are, the more you're using the network to find friends as opposed to colleagues, and the greater your unmet needs for affirmation and attention, the more you will be led into reaction. One slip-up will not bring your career to a halt, but you should definitely be aware of the phenomenon. * The temptation to pretense. Electronic communication affords the illusion of semi-anonymity: since people only know you by your mailbox address, you tend to lose the inhibitions that normally keep you from pronouncing on matters that you are not really informed about. The chatty informality of most e-mail discussion groups, which is certainly capable of being a force for good in the world, nonetheless also tends to wear down these inhibitions. Besides, everyone else is doing it. But pretending to know things is just as bad an idea on e-mail as it is face-to-face. Keep focused on your own unique professional contributions and let the random chatter slide. Beware: many people revile this injunction against pretense, based on a false conception of community and a misguided fear of elitism. I am certainly not promoting the reign of experts here; I am simply applying to electronic communication the everyday injunction to know what you're talking about. * The temptation to paranoia. Along with your own anonymity goes the frequent difficulty of knowing who exactly is receiving your discussion-group messages. As a result, many people just listen in, terrified to say anything for fear that they will be dumped on by powerful experts. This problem is not exclusive to e-mail, of course, but it is quite real. The solution is to focus on the careful, step-by-step process of approaching individuals, leaving group participation until you feel more comfortable -- which you will, eventually. * The temptation to get overwhelmed. It's easy to sign up for everything that sounds interesting, or to pursue dozens of people in every direction, only to find yourself swamped with messages to read and favors to return. If you're getting more than about twenty messages a day in your mailbox then you should probably review your goals and prune back accordingly. * The temptation to get addicted. Addiction means getting overwhelmed on purpose. It's tremendously common. The test is, can I just decide to give it a rest for a few days? * The temptation to waste time. Exploring the net is a tremendous way to avoid writing your thesis. It goes on forever these days, and you can waste a great deal of time playing with it. Unfortunately, random exploration will rarely yield network information resources that are actually useful to your real career goals. Useful information is always bound up with useful people. Therefore, your explorations of the network will most usefully be guided by your goals and structured by the search for people to add to your network. If you really do care about on-line information resources, develop a good relationship with a librarian. Librarians are almost uniformly wonderful people who enjoy helping you find things, whether on the net or elsewhere. (If you're shy about asking people to do things for you, instead tell them what you're trying to accomplish and ask them for advice about how to do it yourself and for suggestions about who might be able to help you.) * The temptation to blame e-mail for your problems. If you're a beginner with electronic communication, you will probably have a few mishaps at some point: getting put down by somebody, acting on an impulse that you later regret, inadvertently sending a message to the wrong person, violating the obscure protocols of professional communication, getting overwhelmed with marginally worthwhile messages, finding yourself trapped in long, complicated correspondences, or whatever. When this happens, you might be moved to blame the medium; you'll find yourself saying that e-mail is dangerous or worthless or overwhelming. But ask yourself: do similar things happen in group meetings or conferences or over the telephone or in paper mail? E-mail has its shortcomings to be sure, but it's just a tool like any other. You'll have to learn how to use it, what to use it for, and when not to use it. Of course, a little messing around won't kill you. And it's just as bad to go to the opposite extreme and become a compulsive machine for scoring points and making connections. What matters is understanding whatever you're doing within the bigger picture of your life and career. So, assuming you've been duly admonished against these temptations, what ARE the most constructive uses of electronic communication? Let's review the six-step networking process I outlined above and look for opportunities to use electronic mail to ease the various steps: (1) Know your goals. Electronic mail can't help you much here. Indeed, you'll need to make sure that your goals are not defined narrowly in terms of electronic mail. Once you've begun corresponding with people you consider wise, you can begin to seek advice from them. Asking for advice is an art in itself, and other things being equal it's best done face-to-face, but once you know someone fairly well on a face-to-face basis you can move some of the discussion to e-mail. (2) Identify some relevant people. Listening in on discussion groups is one way of finding relevant people, especially the ones who aren't so famous. If someone in a discussion impresses you, fight the temptation to approach them right away. (It's obviously okay to answer routine functional requests on the order of, "does anyone know ...?", provided you simply answer the request and leave the networking for later.) Instead, consult your library's card catalog and periodical indexes (which are probably on-line anyway), look the person up, read a sample of what they've written, and proceed with the next step. Only if you cannot find any relevant publications should you consider sending them a concise note saying, "what you said about XXX is interesting to me because of YYY; if you have an article on the subject ready to distribute then I'd much appreciate a copy". Having listened in on a discussion group for a while and observed its customs and conventions, you might then consider contributing something yourself. Don't just react or chat. Instead, write a really intelligent, self-respecting, unshowy, low-key, less-than-one-page message that makes a single, clearly stated point about a topic that's relevant to both their interests and your own, preferably but not necessarily as a contribution to an ongoing discussion. Sit on this message overnight to make sure you're not just reacting to something or repeating a familiar point that happens to make people in your community feel good. If you're feeling uneasy or compulsive about it then get comments from someone close to you whose judgement you trust. Having thus refined your message, contribute it to the discussion group and see what happens. If nothing happens, don't sweat it. If it starts a discussion then listen respectfully, constructively acknowledge all halfways worthwhile responses, and be sure you're not just reacting to things. This process might flush out some people worth adding to your network. Or it might not. In any case it will get your name out and will, with remarkable efficiency, establish your reputation as an intelligent and thoughtful person. Remember: don't bother doing any of this until you've written up some work and are ready to actually start building your network. (3) Court these people individually. In the old days, the article and letter you sent to approach someone were both printed on paper. Should you use electronic mail instead? I actually recommend using paper. At least you shouldn't use electronic media just because they're fun. For one thing, paper is much easier to flip through quickly or to read on the subway. It's also much easier to write comments on. Use your judgement. If you do decide to employ electronic mail for this purpose, use just as much care as you would on paper. Remember that first impressions count. And don't try to use e-mail for the get-to-know-you type of chatting that should logically follow at this point. Instead ... (4) Meet this person face-to-face. I believe firmly, despite all the talk about "virtual reality" and "electronic communities", that electronic communication does not make face-to-face interaction obsolete. Instead, as I said at the outset, you should think of e-mail and face-to-face interaction as part of a larger ecology of communication media, each with its own role to play. In particular, I honestly believe that you do not really have a professional relationship with someone until you have spoken with them face-to-face at length, preferably in a relaxed setting over a social beverage. Call me old-fashioned if you will, but make sure that any aversion you might have to face-to-face interaction isn't based on inertia or fear. Inertia and fear are normal feelings, but they have to be worked through and faced. Having said that, the availability of e-mail will nonetheless bring subtle changes to the ecology of communication in your field. This is particularly true with regard to the telephone, whose uses change considerably in e-mail-intensive communities -- so much so, in fact, that many people nearly stop using the phone altogether (or never learn how) and try to use e-mail for unsuitable purposes like asking discussion groups for information that could have been gotten more easily through resources listed in the front of the phone book. (It's amazing what you can accomplish over the telephone once you learn how.) But the role of face-to-face interaction will change as well, particularly since many kinds of routine work can be conducted almost as easily at a distance electronically as in formal meetings face-to-face. Electronic communication might even allow face-to-face interaction to shift its balance from its practical to its ritual functions. In any case, the general lesson is to pay attention to the relationships among media so you can use the right tool for each job. One more note: when you go to a professional meeting, take a minute to flip through your e-mail correspondence and make a list (ideally on paper) of all the people you've "met" on-line who might attend the conference. Few things are more embarrassing than drawing a blank when someone at a conference approaches you and tries to pick up a conversation begun on e-mail. (5) Exchange drafts. Once again, you should decide whether to use paper or electronic mail to exchange drafts of articles. My own practice, usually, is to highlight passages and write brief comments on a paper copy of an article, take a moment to clear my mind and ask myself what the overall point was and what my overall constructive response is, and then use e-mail to send the author longer and more intelligible versions of those comments. Since I do this quickly after reading the paper (within a couple of days) while my impressions are still fresh in mind, the resulting e-mail messages are limited primarily by how fast I can type. As a result, they can be unusually helpful even though they don't actually take that long to prepare. If necessary I'll also offer to paper-mail the author the marked-up draft for the sake of minor proofreading details that are too much trouble to type in. Notice the fairly complex interactions between paper and electronic forms of communication. You may find different practices more convenient; the point is to be aware that you have a choice. I even know people who tape-record their comments on a paper while they're reading it and then send the author the tape. Keep your real goals in mind and be creative. (6) Follow up. This is the one area where e-mail makes a qualitative difference. Once you've established a professional relationship with someone, e-mail provides a convenient way to maintain a steady, low-key background of useful two-way interactions. You might wish to forward things to people (abstracts, interesting messages, conference announcements, press releases, book reviews, whatever) depending on their interests. Don't overdo it and pay attention to whether the gesture is being reciprocated. After a (long) while you might consider building an electronic mailing list of people who share your interests and would like to get interesting stuff forwarded to them routinely -- including, of course, your own abstracts and shorter papers. Never add anybody to such a list (or any list) without asking them, and never pressure them or make a big deal out of it. E-mail is also obviously useful for a wide variety of other purposes, for example scheduling and organizing professional events. Make sure that some purpose is actually being served; don't engage in e-mail correspondence simply for the sake of it. And don't do any of this stuff with someone unless you've gone through the previous five steps and established a real, functioning relationship with them. Finally, double-check that you're keeping track of the difference between a professional relationship and a personal relationship. A good test is, would I call this person up on a Friday night and suggest going to a movie? Even then, give any such transition in the relationship a little time to sink in before you start to rely on it. Let me conclude with some comments about community-building. Electronic networks provide a number of technical means for assembling groups of people into semi-structured forms of communication. Most of them are modeled on paper-mail mailing lists, though many people have been experimenting with other mechanisms. And no doubt some of these mechanisms will prove useful. My point here, though, is to ensure that you view community-building in a broad context. A community is made of people, not computers. It is tempting to simply announce a new mailing list, gather lots of names, and hope that something good happens. I've done this myself. Unfortunately, it rarely works very well. Even when you do start feeling good about some of the interactions you've had on the net, human possibility really does run deeper than abstract network-interaction is likely to afford any time soon. In short, I see no substitute for the hard human work of building community one person at a time, on the basis of openly explored shared interests, through interactions in a variety of media. Communities built in this fashion hold together because they are fastened with the real glue of human relationship, not just the technical glue of codes and files. This is not to say that electronic media are useless. Quite the contrary, I've just explained several ways in which e-mail can accelerate the already existing process of building professional relationships. And just as relationships are conducted through a variety of media, so are communities. A community has to meet in person (preferably somewhere nice), eat and drink as a group (preferably in a memorable way), discuss various formulations of the shared vision that brings them together (without trying to force a false consensus), engage in concrete collective projects (editing books, running workshops), and so forth, and suitably constructed electronic media will often have a useful role to play in these activities. This is not the place to explore this process in detail, but I hope the first principles are clear: * Cultivate an understanding of the social logic of community-building. * Use electronic media as part of a larger ecology of communication. * Try out new mechanisms, but don't make them substitute for human contact. * Consciously improve and evolve existing ways of doing things. * Let it take time. You may be overwhelmed at this point by the degree of structure I seem to be placing on your electronic interactions. But while these guidelines are not set in stone, neither are they arbitrary. They are simply an application to electronic communications of the larger, preexisting social logic of professional communities. I've restricted my attention to one kind of community, namely research communities based on publication. But every other kind of community has its own social logic and therefore its own particular structured ways of using various media. If you don't like the structures you encounter, please go right ahead and start changing them -- just make sure you're changing things down here on earth, amidst your actual relationships with actual people, and not in an abstract technological head-space. If the structures do sometimes seem arbitrary, that's because we're all accustomed to thinking of electronic media as a world unto themselves, sealed off from the ordinary corporeal world. Where did we get this idea of cyber-reality as a wholly separate sphere? We got it from the fantasy system that underlies a great deal of technical work: the masculine transcendentalism that identifies technology -- and especially computers -- with a millenial escape from imperfections and bodies and the accidents of culture and history. By learning to use electronic media wisely, we do more than help our own careers -- we also contribute to a vision of community that acknowledges human life as it actually is. Appendix: Some references on networking. First, here are some general guides to professional networking, without any special reference to electronic mail: Donna Fisher and Sandy Vilas, Power Networking, Austin: Mountain Harbour, 1992. This is the best all-around book on the subject. It abstracts a long list of guidelines that apply just about as much to research people as to the corporate people who are their main audience. Susan Roane, The Secrets of Savvy Networking, New York: Warner, 1993. An adequate book on networking, less sophisticated and narrower in application than Fisher and Vilas' book but much more widely available. Tom Jackson, Guerrilla Tactics in the New Job Market, second edition, New York: Bantam, 1991. A truly inspired book on the networking that's involved in finding a job through the "hidden job market" of hiring referrals. Joan M. Brandon, ed, Networking: A Trainer's Manual, Amherst: Community Education Resource Center (225 Furcolo Hall, School of Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst MA 01003), 1982. Developed for people in community education, this is the most conceptually sophisticated book on the list. Last I heard, it was available by mail-order from the above address for $9.25. The modern project of articulating guidelines for networking originates (more or less) with feminist authors of the 1980's. Their books still hold some interest: Carol Kleiman, Women's Networks: The Complete Guide to Getting a Better Job, Advancing Your Career, and Feeling Great as a Woman Through Networking, New York: Lippincott and Crowell, 1980. Aimed at women professionals and executives who wish to set up relatively formal networking organizations. Ann Boe and Betty B. Youngs, Is Your "Net" Working?: A Complete Guide to Building Contacts and Career Visibility, New York: Wiley, 1989. A later book in the same spirit, more ambitious but less successful than the others, based on (fictional?) stories about mistakes people make in their networking activities. Betty Lehan Harragan, Games Mother Never Taught You: Corporate Gamesmanship for Women, New York: Rawson, 1977. Although not centrally concerned with networking, I mention this book because of its cultural influence as the first hard-hitting how-the-world-really-works book for professional women. Its ideology, which has shaped many feminist discussions of networking since then, reflects both the strengths and weaknesses of the feminism of that era. One of the weaknesses is its inattention to social class; it explains that men learn how the world work through playing football, even though this would predict that working-class men would be as successful in business as their wealthier brothers. And here are a few references for business-oriented literature on contemporary patterns of networking: Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler, Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. A general study of organizational uses of electronic mail. Bernard Michael Gilroy, Networking in Multinational Enterprises: The Importance of Strategic Alliances, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. The economics behind ongoing changes in the workings of global companies, in which the boundaries of the enterprise are less clear and employees' own networks have increasing economic consequences. Howard E. Aldrich and Mary Ann von Glinow, Personal networks and infrastructure development, in David V. Gibson, George Kozmetsky, and Raymond W. Smilor, eds, The Technopolis Phenomenon: Smart Cities, Fast Systems, Global Networks, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992. Approaches to rationalizing and managing the networking process through social psychology, network mapping, and systematic development of networks. Acknowledgements. This essay has been improved by comments from Robert Barger, Harry Collins, Paul Dourish, Rebecca Henderson, Marty Hiller, Yvonne Rogers, Susan Sterne, Jozsef Toth, and Jeremy Wertheimer. Advertisement. 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