-Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1993 19:36:16 -0700
-From: pagre@weber.ucsd.edu (Phil Agre)
-To: ts@uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi)
-Subject: networking

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 11 June 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 widely applicable.  Everyone's life is different, cultures
and disciplines have their own conventions, and it's all just my opinion, but
perhaps my suggestions will be useful anyway.  Do not interpret them as a set
of rules, but rather as a resource in figuring out your own personal way of
getting around in the 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 develops as you live your life.  If you don't
have any worked-out values, get some.  You'll need them.

My most important message to you 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.  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 most important activity of all: 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 on the net, you're probably screwing
up.

So, at the most fundamental level, 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.  The
term "networking" and the associated skills became fashionable during the
1980's, but only recently have decent books on the subject begun to appear.
Here are a few of them:

Donna and Sandy Vilas, Power Networking, Austin: Mountain Harbour, 1992.

Susan Roane, The Secrets of Savvy Networking, New York: Warner, 1993.

Tom Jackson, Guerrilla Tactics in the New Job Market, second edition, New
York: Bantam, 1991.

Joan M. Brandon, ed, Networking: A Trainer's Manual, Amherst: Community
Education Resource Center, School of Education, University of Massachusetts,
1982.

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", or because it supposedly takes time away from "getting real
work done".  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.
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.  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 networking.  They will sound
cumbersome.  You'll be able to skip some of the steps as you get established
in your field, 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 okay if 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 a well-kept
secret.  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; (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.  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.  I can guarantee you that 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.

(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.  Believe it or not, your single
most important audience is 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.  This draft-exchanging ritual is
tremendously important, but nobody ever teaches you how to do it.  When in
doubt, ask for help.  And if somebody comments a draft for you, 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 activities
such as workshops and journal issues, and so forth.  Nonetheless, we've seen
enough to establish several basic points about the networking process:

 * It takes time -- you have to be patient and let it happen.

 * It focuses on particular individuals and particular relationships.

 * 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.

Keep trying to articulate more basic points for yourself.

Having surveyed the basics of networking and professional relationships,
we can begin 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.  Except for
purely personal messages to friends and family, every single 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.  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 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 should always 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.
(Hint: 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?  I'll bet they do.
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
uses SHOULD you make 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 wise people, 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.  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.  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.  Now, the availability of e-mail will probably 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 (within a couple of days) while my impressions of the paper
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'm
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.


Acknowledgements.  This essay has been improved by comments from Robert
Barger, Paul Dourish, Rebecca Henderson, Marty Hiller, Yvonne Rogers, Jozsef
Toth, and Jeremy Wertheimer.
