"Should I call him or not..." Carlo has been tormenting himself for more than half an hour. With the telephone in one hand, he is tortured by indecision. "I'll call him and borrow his car, but... he is so miserly. I can't imagine he would lend me his precious car! I'll go to him, but he will only say no to me..." Such a waste of time... Darn, but I really need his car... We'll see what happens, I'm calling him. Carlo is starting to press the numbers, but his thoughts keep nagging him. "I know he won't lend it to me, he is so selfish and he has never done anything for anyone..." The phone rings. "Imagine, what a stupid idea to ask Rodolfo for his car. It's just a waste of time..." From the receiver comes out Rodolfo's voice: "Hello?" "Hi, this is Carlo. Listen... Go to hell, you and your car you selfish brat!" This is an old story that goes around in sociology classes, and it is very important to me, I owe it one of the most difficult concepts to grasp: the importance to understand the form and the way to correctly navigate the networks of relationships in social networks and work groups. These are nothing else but the digital representations of a small subset of the much more important web of friends, colleagues, family members that shape the real world in which we build on a daily basis our integration and our autonomy. Modern sociology is making a key issue out of it (H. Chesbrough, Open Innovation, Oxford University Press) and the academic authority is already demonstrating its first theorems (A. Barabasi, Link, Einaudi). The entire humanity is a web of relationships and it is demonstrated that given any two points, it is always possible to connect them in a finite and relatively small number of hops, connecting jumps. I thought about it. Among my friends, there is a journalist who studied with a democratic senator, a very good friend of Hillary Clinton who, presumably, knows Barack Obama. So, this would mean four jumps if I ever wanted to contact the President of the United States, I could but... Careful not to make Carlo's mistake. If I wanted to express to Barack that I agree with his public health reform, I could do so quickly. An email to my journalist friend transferred quickly to the American Parliament to Hillary then the President! But, what if I wanted to tell Obama that he was wrong all the way? The previous navigation would be blocked immediately. Maybe my friend would accept to communicate my disapproval to the Senator, but everything would stop right there and in complete embarrassment. Our web of relationships is the most important thing we have, but it is within it that we make the worst mistakes. Losing our job, for example, or experiencing the more dramatic emotional problems of a separation or a serious disease pushes us to clutch to everything, mainly, our network of relationships. The most important thing we have and count on seems to completely disappear. We call an old colleague, we call a friend we had before the wicked deed happened and... surprise! The web is no longer there. So much solidarity, pats on the shoulder, but where is the help we need? Are we really all alone? Has everything really dissolved to nothing? The other day an ex-colleague of mine, retired now, called me. Before he left, he regularly came into the office sharing his enthusiasm: "As soon as I finally retire I'll be able to seriously dedicate myself to studying Greek and Latin!" "How are your studies going?" I asked over the phone, thinking this question would please him. "Well, fine, but you know, Greek and Latin... Listen, do you have anything I could do? Talk to the boss about it and..." Wrong question and wrong navigation in the old web of relationships.
If I had not read the text by Chesbrough and Barabasi... embarrassment, pat on the shoulder and the end of a phone conversation with the saddest "Bye now, we'll talk again soon..." breaking up part of that web. He was lucky though and I was able to correct his mistake. I represented to him only the first level of the web which is fed by the daily communion of objectives and intentions, which were not as frequent following his retirement. Each one of us, however, is a gate towards other levels of the web. In fact, I know a teacher involved in a project to create for blind people a voice synthesis for the study of Greek. "Listen", I said to him. "What do you think about giving a hand to a friend who is challenged with a technology issue relating to Ancient Greek?" The first level of the web of relationships is the one that knows us best and can help us reach new levels if we navigate well. If we make a mistake, it becomes a rubber wall when everything goes well and the drama of the web destruction when everything goes wrong. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, are only the most well-known icons of the social networks: information and communication technology, the computerization of our network of relationships, that allows us to get out of the web, the world on the desktop, and let family members, friends and colleagues enter our small personal world, share our everyday life, but most of all navigate our current and potential relationships. Facebook is the virtualization of the backyard, of the Banisters house in which groups of friends organize an evening or a vacation, but through the subnetworks (friends of friends, to use a Facebook metaphor) are the gate of new surfable relations with the searching power of data mining, a true database and not limited as can be our memory... If my retired colleague had searched among my Facebook friends, he himself would have found the Greek teacher and could have asked me to introduce him or contact him directly without my intervention using me as a reference. I personally would not have felt responsible for helping a person in need, but for contributing to the consolidation of another nub of my subnetwork gaining in social prestige. Contrary to Facebook, based on the concept of friendship, LinkedIn is based on the principle of collaboration and contributors. Subnetworks are created, they grow and are modified thanks to projects we feel we should contribute in, and here again is a powerful tool for surfing among relationships.
