Returning to Micro-Networks

[caseyfern]

We have micro-blogging, with Twitter and the growing number of ways to tweet to your followers. We have micro-funding, where a person can get small amounts of capital. We had micro-skirts. (Thank goodness those days have passed, although I was never a proponent nor in any shape to wear one.) We've had microcosms for a few billion years. Micro can be a Good Thing.

The days of micro-networks are here again. We've always had them. We've probably all used them, participated in them to some extent.

Family is where it starts for almost all of us. Mother, father, grandparents, siblings, extended threads of relationships by bloodline or marriage. Our sphere of influence.

In high school, they were cliques in the lunchroom, the team we hung out with in the halls, sometimes dominated by a strong personality. We inhaled our news that way and exhaled support. And news traveled fast, in whispers and across midnight phone lines. We were Best Friends Forever, or at least until summer.

In college, they were sororities and dorm floors in whatever spare moments we had between classes, lectures, labs and cram sessions. Strong ties rapidly formed and, sadly, as rapidly broken, through departures, graduations, the sheer weight of time and distance - a friendship that survived is likely life-long.

At some times in our past they've been backyard fences at which we gathered for the latest neighborhood news, to find out who might need a visit, to catch up on the state of Joe's job, Jane's broken leg.

Then the simplicity ends. Out in the Real World, our bonds form, gel, stick, mature at a different pace, for different reasons, and usually due to our own proactive steps. The most social of us join breakfast clubs, luncheon clubs, round tables, business and community networks, chambers of commerce, church groups, garden groups, reading clubs, charity groups, book circles, cause groups, social clubs and more. We keep four printing companies fed and well dressed with our business card orders. At the end of a hectic day of networking and meetings, we come home, slip off our heels, grab a nuked dinner, and log onto Facebook and MySpace to network some more. We network, Network, NETWORK - and then wonder why we're so durn tired.

Time to return to the simplicity and low-pressure environments - the micro-networks - where it's possible to get to know everyone, talk with anyone, share with everyone, without worrying if you've got all nine million participants on your friends list.