By Adam Jeanes
I am a network junkie. I join networks all the time.I can’t help myself. I crave networks. It’s a kind of compulsive behaviour I have developed as a result of working on international cultural projects. If you are not in a network you’re no one. You can “score” a network any time – they’re on offer like candy on every street corner – tempting me in, luring me to join them: especially the online ones, which can satisfy my addiction with a simple mouse-click. Why am I afflicted with the curse of this promiscuous networking? I suppose I am searching for the impossible: the network that will solve all my questions, provide me with access to hundreds of useful people, get me a job, a soulmate, that will make my daily career struggles easier to bear - a kind of networking nirvana. One day I might find it but in the meantime – give me more!
Just recently I have even joined a network for no reason at all – or rather I joined it because its motto is “There shall be no outcomes”. I liked the sound of that. This is The Gorilla Club, a social network of UK cultural people which meets regularly just to talk and listen to each other.
Its founder Colin Hicks, Quebecois Cultural Attache in London explains that the club name comes from a question he once heard: “why is a gorilla’s brain so big?” Or put it another way, why did primates (including humans) evolve with such disproportionately large brains?[1]
The answer is because gorillas are networkers. Evolutionary psychologist Robert Dunbar[2] believes that the size of primates’ brains reflect the complexity of their social lives. A gorilla spends a lot of time in social interaction, bonding, grooming and even a certain amount of tactical deception and therefore needs a big brain to carry this out successfully.
However networking for gorillas has its limits. It is time-consuming to groom everyone you want to impress and a mental strain to live in such an interactive social setting. There is a limit on the number of stable bonds a single gorilla can maintain.This is true of other primates, including us. Chimps can manage a cohesive social network of around 50 individuals maximum with a core group of 2 or 3 closest grooming companions. Human beings, according to Dunbar, can interact with a cohesive social network of around 150 people with about 12 intimates. Humans needed to form, as he puts it, “unusually large groups” to face the particular conditions they faced.
This figure of 150 (which is known as the “Dunbar Number”) may sound like it is plucked out of the air but there are many examples of cohesive human groups numbering around 150 (or thereabouts) throughout history.For example, from Classical Rome to Wartime Germany professional armies tend to organise their smallest independent military units ("a company") in groups of around 150 soldiers on average. Of course it is possible to have organised human groupings of more than 150 – such as countries, religions or political parties – but groups of this size can only be regulated and held together by external laws and strict rules.
Dunbar’s number can be applied to networks in the virtual world as well.Some web commentators have claimed that an individual’s online social networks (on platforms known as “social or professional networking tools” such as LinkedIn, Friendster and MySpace) “max out” at about 150 contacts. We may have vast numbers of people connected to us on MySpace as “friends” but we can really only interact with and “care about” 150 individuals successfully. British pop star Lily Allen launched her career through her own MySpace.As of today she has 224,158 friends, lucky her, but she surely can only ”know” a fraction of them. But the number of people she can now potentially “groom” is huge.In this case, her MySpace has become part of a marketing campaign driven by commercial gain and that number is shown merely to point out how popular she is as an artist. Social networking tools have a tendency to turn people into show offs.And showing-off does not (ironically) win friends.
Social networking software and products like LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace are being hailed as the “next big thing” on the internet. The use of social networking tools is even being explored by corporate bodies especially those which are multi-centred and multi-national. A lot of this is business hype, but “knowledge management” which was the “next big thing” a few years ago, is now being replaced by blogs, wikis, social bookmarking and tagging services which are rapidly becoming part of the everyday working culture in many large organisations. In fact one commentator[3] feels that knowledge management is an early example of a failed social network experiment, because companies tried to treat human beings as walking databases that could download the data in their heads into a computer system. In this way, the theory says, the really important data (the knowledge) will be shared by all.In fact what happens in such companies is that they simply become data rich and information poor. Information is only valuable as knowledge when it is applied in a human context by human beings interacting with other human beings socially (grooming) – hence corporate interest in social networking tools.
These random thoughts have been playing in my head for a number of months, especially since I have changed roles from developing online cultural knowledge management systems and re-entered the real world of cultural production and training. Between 2000 and 2005 I was Assistant Director at Visiting Arts were I ran the Cultural Profiles Project and was one of the developers of culturebase.net. These are both straightforward information databases: I say straightforward although behind them both are two complex content management systems and a lot of research and development.Culturebase has recently taken a decision to change from being “a straightforward database” to something more akin to a social/professional networking site with its Culture 2000-funded Europe Now/Europe Next project. (I think it’s legitimate to use the term “social/professional network”, because although I recognise I am mixing two product types, in reality the line is blurred in culture since much of the professional is also social: how many times have you sealed a deal after the conference sessions late at night in the bar?)
Our desire for culturebase was to reinvent it as a place where people could interact rather than just browse. Instinctively we felt that there was a need for a new set of tools to facilitate networking and the exchange of ideas; a need which arose from a change in the way contemporary artists are operating. We were not alone in this feeling. The Informal European Theatre Meeting (IETM), a network created in the days before Perestroika and the fax machine, is now the originator of On the Move – an electronic newsletter and website with a forum that provides networking opportunities to the contemporary performing arts sector. Several other “traditional” or longstanding networks have also beefed up their online presence over the last few years. This has the effect of throwing a considerable amount of information into the public domain in an unregulated fashion under the name of “knowledge” when it is really only “data”. All information is to be welcomed: contacts and information are a prerequisite for international exchange to take place, but we have got into a situation where the volume of it is becoming a barrier to comprehension. We too are now “data rich and information poor”.
Attempts have been made, especially by the LabforCulture, to try to get to grips with the volume of internet data on international exchange through indexing and collating of key pages and documents – what was referred to as the “Cultural Google”. But simultaneously in the real world people have moved on from the Google Generation to the MySpace Generation, a trend which the LabforCulture reflects in its blogs and fora. This generation makes their own connections via their “friends” and select and collate their own useful information.Knowledge is now located in these sites and wikis, not on the general web. We don’t need a Cultural Google as such, we need a cultural LinkedIn, Facebook or Friendster: a social/professional networking project for European culture. And equally we don’t need a universal network indexing all of Europe’s cultural operators because our primate brains can only cope with 150 of them at a time. We need a system of interlocking “MySpaces” that can form focused “clusters” around particular issues and which dissolve and reform into new clusters as an when required.
So are these Cultural Social Network Tools the potential network nirvana I am dreaming of? Well, perhaps – and perhaps not. Consider for example the experience of the media art festival Node London (http://nodel.org/) which held its main season in March 2006. Node London was about developing and making visible the structure of media arts in the city. Before it was created there was no one single point of information about media artists or media resources in the UK capital.Sure you could Google the term and would retrieve many useful resources, but Node London researched the physical presence of studios and other media resources in London and presented them on a city map. Suddenly artists found out that they were living next door to a media art studio they never knew about or that their local college had a set of state of the art digital projectors. And by joining the online community of Node London they could communicate with the people holding or owning those resources.In short they were able to cluster in the virtual universe as well as in the physical world.
Node London offers interesting lessons for distributed creativity and distributed management. Node was run by its membership – a group of voluntary organisers who worked in an open structure so that anybody could join it, come to the meetings or participate in the discussions online. People were free to offer to do something to help organise the event.No one was “the leader” and each could take away whatever they felt benefited them most. Node is both a social and a professional link-up exercise. Its multi-centred and voluntary nature mirrors the MySpace model.Tim Jones’s comments (see Comments) also shows the practical limitations of social-professional tools in managing online projects.[4]
When a network goes dead, several things may have happened behind the scenes but usually the main reason is that people have simply lost interest. So what keeps a network living (online and in real life)?CEO of LinkedIn, a social/professional networking site, Reid Hoffman believes that a successful online network must have a mix of “haves” and “have-nots”. In professional networking, the haves are the individuals who have a job, who have money to invest, someone who can commit their company to a deal, etc. They have the resources available to help the have-nots who don't, but do have the talent, the idea, and the energy.”[5]In Node London’s case, everybody had simply become a “have” – they had “had Node London” and so the network faded. But this is not a disaster. Only the clusters have dispersed, not the network – Node London still exists and may well spring back into life when the balance of “haves” and “have-nots” is restored.
This mixing of “haves” and “have-nots” has powered IETM and other real time networks well through the years: people go to IETM with a project to pitch, producers go there to meet potential artists. But “traditional” networks – the face to face kind, like IETM – are essentially collectives of like-minded individuals or similar organisations that group together for professional and social reasons. The Node London experience has a lot to teach the developers of online cultural networks, whether they are freestanding or attached to an existing “traditional” network. The greater the variety of clusters within a network, the more likely there is to be a “have-have-not” dynamic somewhere in that network – and perhaps this is the direction that cultural networks should head in. We will still need the solidly funded, face-to-face network (whether for buy and selling of cultural products or for advocacy and solidarity) but I believe that these networks should concentrate not on information output through their virtual presence, but on the development of small sub-grouped clusters that can groom together, exchanging and developing new ideas together.Imagine them like the independent military companies within a larger army that march out to do battle with EU funding policy or mobility issues.
Dunbar says that the ancestral humans chose to live in “unusually large groups” because the particular conditions they faced at the time demanded it. The particular conditions that we face at the moment include the fact that new technology has increased the ability of the individual to consume culture and information (through MySpace, YouTube etc) and simultaneously increased the amount and variety of culture and information available to be consumed. As a result, artists and the cultural operators (that’s us) must be able to communicate and interact at least as fast as our audiences can.
Social networking tools may not quite be “there” yet, but they are a step forward from what we have currently invested in. The structures that support artistic work, its development and distribution – the networks, institutions and funders – need to reform and diversify themselves to accommodate this change in working and the audience. The LabforCulture is a good example of a coming together of different bodies to create a diversified “unusually large group” – and within it are a series of interesting clusters of people examining the glamorous and the non-so-glamorous issues of international cultural working in Europe.
I don’t believe for one minute that these “particular conditions” threaten the existence of the traditional face-to-face networks.They are an old and trusted technology – at the moment more reliable than anything online. Take for example, International PEN, an old and courageous organisation (formed even before the invention of computers!) which offers support to writers experiencing censorship and imprisonment all over the world. They are increasingly supporting authors who have published material online which is not to the taste of the censors.PEN is an organisation what we will always need. What lies ahead is an opportunity for the development of new tools that individuals, organisations and networks can use to extend their reach and pull even closer together the “unusually large group” with whom we live and work.
1. The Gorilla Club remains proudly offline at the present time although its web address will be www.thegorillaclub.co.uk
2. Dunbar, R. I. M. (1993). Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (4): 681-735
3. http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/unspokengroups.html
4. Tim Jones also discusses his experience with Node London in the following pdf from Pixelache the Festival of Electronic Art and Subcultures, Helsinki 29 March - 1 April 07 Finland (p55) http://www.pixelache.ac/2007/publication-web/Pixelache07_Publication.pdf
5. Interview with Reid Hoffman http://www.npost.com/interview.jsp?intID=INT00079
Adam Jeanes is a UK-based arts consultant, trainer and writer working in the area of intercultural dialogue and international collaborations. He is an Associate of the hub
and the Producer of Black/North SEAS with the Swedish organisation Intercult.Adam's background is as a producer of festivals of Muslim, migrant and refugee cultures in the UK. For five years he was the Assistant Director of
where he managed the Visiting Arts Cultural Profile Project and is a member of the project team of www.culturebase.net.His publications include World Music in England (2005).
LabforCulture ist eine Partnerinitiative der European Cultural Foundation. LabforCulture dankt seinen Förderern für Ihre Unterstützung.