Choice is so overwhelming, and the difficulty of deciding so great, that most people opt for the easiest solution–which is to trust the judgement of everyone else. We gravitate to the largest online hub in any particular category, and once there is a clear leader it tends to become even more dominant. Like contestants on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? we ‘ask the audience’. So does the ‘wisdom of crowds’ work on the Internet simply because it’s too difficult to decide on our own? Or do the search engines determine where the crowd goes? Google’s recursive algorithm ranks search results by a site’s links to other popular sites. It’s rather like the powerful and famous voting on who should remain powerful and famous.
We have argued that the most important decisions in our lives are our choices of links and hubs. How does cyberspace affect these decisions?
Clearly, the Internet makes it possible to cultivate many more weak links and participate in many more hubs. Social networks and tools to mine our relationships have proliferated, helping us record, organise and manage our online connections, acquaintances and memberships. The social networks can give us a glimpse of our social graph–our links through immediate and intermediate contacts–which is very useful for seeking introductions, recommendations and references. They allow us to map our links to friends and the links between them. We can see whether our network is open and bridges unconnected worlds, or whether it is incestuous and densely interconnected. The Web really does allow us to forge and manage hundreds or thousands of weak (and strong) links. You don’t have to spend hours a day on Facebook or LinkedIn–just put up your profile and start rediscovering and tracking long-forgotten friends and contacts with very little effort. We can use these networks like a living phonebook, without spending our life on them. If this results in more real-life reunions and exchanges, the potential benefits are considerable.
Yet, even the most dazzling improvements in technology may struggle to change the basic social, economic and even physical rules governing human interaction–the structures that our genes and cultures have evolved over myriad millennia. Language and communication can be compressed into movable type and even more into cyberspace, but we have evolved to understand more, be happiest and feel most alive when communicating face to face. Anthropologists say that technology does not multiply our biological capacity to manage meaningful relationships, those in which some degree of trust and reciprocity are taken for granted.
They are probably right. Can you imagine falling in love over the Internet without ever meeting your beloved? We hope not. By contrast, love at first sight often endures in real life. Have you ever experienced ‘email cross-purposes’, when an innocent and uncritical line of text unintentionally makes the recipient really angry? Although such misunderstandings can also occur face to face, they are surely much less frequent and more easily corrected. The virtual world has tremendous range, but far less depth and emotional power. It cannot convey subtle and personally rich information, especially between people who do not know each other well, and it is most effective when allied to traditional face-to-face communication. We need personal connections. The addict needs a frequent fix, and nearly all of us need frequent face-to-face connections–the warm, complex, unpredictable and response-inducing banter of human interaction, even with people we barely know. It keeps us going. We need to collaborate, even if only for a moment. So it seems unlikely that many serious human purposes can be fulfilled solely through virtual means. Wikipedia may be an exception, but even there its heavy-duty volunteers often seem grumpy and at each other’s (unseen) throats. Consensus, empathy and harmony are much easier to achieve when we see each other almost every day, and see the hurt dissent may create.
We hope you agree that the online world requires balancing with a large dose of offline reality. The aspects of our lives that really matter–who we’re with, what we do for a living, our health, where we make our home–must take place primarily in the real world. Perhaps our children will evolve into cyberspace versions of Star Trek’s Mr Spock, where knowledge is perfect and everything is rational and calculated. We shudder at the prospect, but we also doubt it. The emergence of language and the spread of printed books greatly enriched and facilitated exchanges between humans, and especially the spread of ideas and inventions. But language and books did not diminish human emotions or our desire to meet people and richly connect with them. The new media add to our powers without diminishing our humanity, neither improving nor worsening human nature.
Just as we should strive not to be dispossessed, we should be equally careful not to be possessed. We know that we are wired to connect naturally, and this may mean we aren’t very good at disconnecting. We saw earlier that real-world hubs exert gravity, making us take them too seriously, luring us into spending too much of our lives in them. Virtual hubs can exert a similar baleful gravity. They attract; then they can addict, trap and distract. Time spent online necessarily diminishes time in the real world.
If cyberspace enables us to encounter dissimilar people we would not otherwise have met, or re-establish old links, it may play a part in improving our lives. But it will not be the main means. The Internet is a very convenient, powerful and enjoyable way of gaining information and communicating, but it is no substitute for something that helps us choose wisely and is as old as humanity itself–face-to-face communication that can jolt and redirect our lives.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ROLODEX ROULETTE
How to tap the power of weak links
I have met so many people…who have proved unexpectedly useful…I don’t see them very often…[but] it is like spinning a roulette wheel–you never know what will come up.
Antony Ball, doyen of South African private equity industry
Mayfair, England, 1996
Here’s how accidental weak links helped me, without my knowledge, as a result of Robin Field’s network. After Robin had turned around Filofax, he was looking for businesses Filofax could acquire. One of these was Topps of England, a stationery company, and Robin began negotiations with a corporate financier who was working for its owner.
The deal went quiet for a couple of years, but the corporate financier stayed in touch with Robin and invited him to lunch at his Mayfair office. Another guest at the meal was Luke Johnson, a serial entrepreneur and now chairman of Channel 4 Television. Luke told Robin about the circumstances surrounding his departure from Pizza Express, a restaurant chain he had co-founded. After a glass or three of red wine, Robin, who is noted for his random ebullience, extravagantly told Luke that he should buy Belgo, a restaurant chain where the waiters dressed as monks and served mussels and chips. Robin added that he knew the main owner–me. Then the conversation moved on to politics and Robin thought no more about it. A year later, Luke–who had never met Robin before, nor saw him again–called him out of the blue and asked for my phone number. After some negotiation, we sold Belgo to Luke for a price beyond our expectations. He really wanted the company.
Curiously, Robin did not mention this introduction to me until I told him recently that I was writing this book. I am now wondering how many of my ‘strokes of good luck’ were really due to tenuous weak links–a chain of contacts where something happens at one or two removes, without our involvement, courtesy of our acquaintances and their networks.
This is really ‘passive networking’, because the network itself does nearly all the work–it rolls on regardless of our efforts. Having good networks is more important than active networking. Maybe people in their twenties and thirties should think carefully about getting into a small number of networks that may be life-long blessings, even when the network links appear to be rusty or in abeyance.