h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: High Society - A87715146
Author: Gaston Prereth - U14993418

To be honest, I felt like I should submit this entry, because it was my first, rather than any impulse or craving for you to love me and for me to find acceptance... I mean who needs acceptance these days... it's overrated...

Actually... Just to add (given the title doesn't really explain the piece very well) This is an editorial (i guess) on Social Networking within 'Business', explaining that despite the business worlds innovation in the past, social networking could be a stumbling block for it.

This is really interesting, thank you for sharing it.

Since we're partly a social networking site, and we hope to have a business aspect now (though a non-profit one), your comments are particularly timely, I think.

I like the 18th-century examples. I think it's a good point that the innovations that brought about the Industrial Revolution with its attendant social changes are comparable to the changes wrought by the internet.

Are you thinking that businesses should realise that social networking by employees could have good results for them? It always seemed to me that corporations prized secrecy, and that too much social networking by employees might be seen as a threat to that secrecy. But maybe I'm reading it wrong.

I totally agree that in the past Busnises have prided secrecy in the past. Both internally as well as externally (just speak to a few salespeople and that is self evident) and I think this is going to be something that needs to change.
But, I think a bigger problem is that social networking, I believe, is bringing the community back into the business sphere. I don't mean businesses who 'do things for the community' as if it were a charity, I mean businesses that are a community in themselves. In some ways it will make them more effecient and flexible in a speeding up world, but itwill also mean they have to do things for the social sake rather than for profitabilty, directly at least.

As to company's who business is social networking... You'll no better than me.

Interesting idea. I've never worked in a large company so I can't even guess whether this is feasible or not.

I think that's an interesting concept. If businesses saw what they did less as a 'bottom line' issue - making a profit, pure and simple - and more as a way of creating and building a working community, enterprises would take on a different look.

Take, for instance, Greece. The Greeks tend to run family businesses. Everybody in the family pitches in. There is little separation between the social aspect and the working aspect. It's fun, and sometimes contentious, but it's a good way to work.

I'm not sure I would wish to want to take the Greeks as an economic model right now, if I had to present this to a Business as the way they should be going forward.

However, the family run business is a good model. It used to be THE model of course until the factory made its appearance. This movement towards the city and centralised Business was seen as a movement forward, but I'm starting to wonder, now that the internet and social media is so embedded in society, if it was merely a trend...


Does anyone here have any knowledge of Max Webber? I seem to remember him talking about the individual losing their individuality as the economic world progressed and we became more like unthinking pen-pushers? I may have dreamed it though. I'd appreciate it if someone in the know could pass me a paper title or write a Guide entry around that. I think I am formulating a response, just need to know I have something to respond to

Gaston

I'm finding the central idea of your piece a bit hard to grasp.
What is it exactly that your trying to say here?
What exactly do you mean when you state:

"if Social Networking is going to take a hold, we may need a revolution ourselves"

The alluding too and connecting to the 18th century is fine but social networking then was actually dying the slow death as a result of industrialisation.
Communities torn apart by inventions that brought to an end 'cottage industry'.
I could digress further and go into detail about 18th century industrial revolution from either that now poo poo-ed marxist viewpoint or the capitalist one.
How would either fit in with your social networking idea and business's perplexity with it?
Is this the 'revolution' you allude too?

Economic determinism via Facebook perhaps.

This is an interesting article, well worth thinking about and debating.

I suppose the aim of most businesses is to produce a product that makes them money. Social networking could be used within a company - if, for example,the company invites their employees to discuss a proposal for a new product or technique.

The problem is that social networking is notoriously hard to control. Not only could the company discover that their employees are passing information outside the firm; but also, once the employees start chatting, they could be doing everything from organising illicit love affairs to planning to topple the boss!

Fast mass communication seems better suited to literal revolutions, as in Arab countries, where mobile phones and social networking sites have been used to send pictures of demonstrations and government crackdowns round the world in a few minutes.