About networking

Below a column text published in our school magazine which I didn't want to be lacking in this blog:

After I posted a photo on my blog I watched it again: wasn’t that beautiful, those colours, framed in a soft kind of black, called “tower black”? I had a nice text underneath it, and all people around the world who would see it, could put a comment to it. Splendid. And then I caught myself being proud of myself. Wasn’t I a wonderful guy, who could make such a thing? It was as if I looked into a mirror, seeing something beautiful. My Better Half realized what I was doing, and disciplined the other, Worse Half. I suddenly realized that I added only the finishing touch to a whole range of valuable activities and achievements that made this possible. I was only a small node in a network. I looked at the painting on my living room wall, representing Indra’s Web. About this network, this web, it’s said (http://fusionanomaly.net/internet.html) “that it extends throughout the cosmos, through the countless planets and immense eons that Buddhists and Hindus recognized millennia before Westerners realized that the earth was not the center of the universe.”
You can admire this painting by Pieter Torensma on http://pieter.torensma.net. Click on 1990-2000 and click on the right one of the two paintings, then you see it enlarged.

On our school we propagate that students should “work on their network”, or simply should “network”. It means that students should contact people that are or could be of importance for their career or future business. This way they form a really positive and advantageous network, in the beginning one-way (experienced people in the business helping them), but soon becoming two-way. In the media you sometimes come across the term “old boys network”: These are not students but business or politics people who regularly contact each other for information and socializing, very useful and positive. More frequently they appear in the media in a negative sense, as a kind of secret fellowship, giving each other favors and protection against lawsuits etc., and keeping women under the glass ceiling J. Ever heard of an “old girls network”? Then you immediately think of a reading club or tea circle, don’t you?
Our school teaches other networks as well, e.g. CPM networks. CPM networks excellently illustrate real-life networks, and are more or less “Indra’s webs” in miniature, focused on a limited time and space. Every activity in a planned, co-operative work project is represented by either a node or an arrow (depending on what you agreed on) and connected to each other in a comprehensive way on paper. You clearly see what contribution an activity has on the other activities. Where activities come together (one is finished, the other one starts) you can see the milestones of a project, the nodes, where something has been achieved.
So, returning to our Indra’s web, I never got such a network-feeling in my life as at that moment after I posted my beautiful photo, and found myself such a genius who could produce something like that. The network-feeling brought me back on my feet. It is something far more beautiful than the photo I produced. At first, there is that whole chain of designers, engineers, managers, workers etc. who gave me the camera. Then, the same holds for the pc where the photo is posted on. But, most admirably and most important, there is the www. It’s the Internet that links all photographers to each other. If you maintain a weblog, and more especially a photoblog, you experience this. Dozens of contacts with people from all over the world. You feel the computer, the Internet, is becoming an extension of your personality. You are part of it, a new social world is opening to you. Not only the photographers are linked together, also designers, ICT-professionals, businesspeople etc., not only in complexity, but also in unity. I’m sure, eventually Internet will contribute to world peace.