By Edoe Cohen, ROI Micro Grant recipient

Social networking has become a buzzword but mankind has been networking since day one. Companies like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have leveraged mans’ ancient urge to connect, have become mega successful in the process and turned ‘social networking’ into a seeming fad. By giving us the tools to share, comment, tweet, and like they are actually bringing into our lives elements of a village community that in many ways modern society had temporarily lost. As I and many other Jewish professionals learned in the recent Schusterman Foundation NetWORKS conference held in Boulder, Colorado, we too can capitalize on these networking instincts in our lives and careers.

In a small village setting you know who your community is, you know all the news and gossip, you share it and are part of it. Clay Shirky argues that the industrial age freed up our time and gave us a “Cognitive Surplus” that was ultimately filled up with television. We no longer entertained ourselves and became dependent on Hollywood and TV to entertain us. But the web has now proven that we are equally interested in watching home videos of babies (Charley bit my finger!), commenting on what our friends are doing, and following the links to articles they find interesting. We are an interconnected village – the size and scope is different, daily life and the flow of information is way more intense – but we are the same humans we were hundreds of years ago. We don’t want to just be passive couch potatoes; we want to be in the village circle, in the village dance and storytelling.

And every community is more than the sum of its parts. There is a synergy that is created when people connect, when they mobilize, when they communicate. As we have recently seen across the Middle East, it was not Mark Zuckerberg who overthrew these corrupt dictatorships, but rather people who now had better access to information and more importantly to each other. Social networking can also be used to influence policy making as was presented to the conference by fellow ROIer Brian Elliot. His project FriendFactor empowers people to lobby their congressmen to approve legislation that would give homosexuals equal rights. What is brilliant about FriendFactor is that it gives “an easy way for Gay Americans to ask their friends for help and Straight Americans to help their gay friends,” capitalizing on the social fabric that connects us.

Arab social network revolutions and projects like FriendFactor might seem out of our league. But we all work within networks and the more we invest in understanding and leveraging the networks around us the more influential we become, and the more impact and reach our work will have.
No, social networks are not new. But our understanding of them is. The village has grown and the means of communicating across the village has changed, but at our core we are still village people.