Peer Relevance

Reading Anne Lister’s¹ 1820-1824 diaries² has left many impressions on me, one of which is the amount of time she spent making social visits. It’s clear from her entries that she enjoyed the company of very few of her acquaintances, but that was not the purpose of the visits. It was rather to make them enjoy hers. I found this mind-blowing.

Anne Lister participated in a culture of self-promotion, the practice of advertising oneself as worthy of opportunities or support, should the occasion arise. Whenever some new resource becomes available, the job interview for manager has already been done, many times. Whether that resource is a husband, business, or property, it can best be handled in-network.

The upper-class women of pre-Victorian Yorkshire had a very detailed picture of their network: who was married to whom, who was in which businesses, who was engaged in legal strife, who was facing financial peril, and so forth. It occurred to me that elite women were the internet of the age, because they had the time and the means to travel and gossip.

This constant networking gave Lister’s class an advantage in situational awareness, because news passes relatively quickly among people who travel frequently. The sources are known and trust can be attributed. Compare this to the lower classes, who were dependent on random travelers for news and were subject to Chinese whispers as a result. While the poor are very well networked at a local level, they were politically ineffective at a regional or national level. And thus, a very small number of people in pre-Victorian Britain were able to out-smart a very large number of people, and to exploit them to smithereens.

One would think that the internet would have been the great equalizer. Now, all classes have access to the same information. However, the Chinese whispers problem has simply been transformed into ‘false news,’ and its propagators have been somehow emboldened by the shiny delivery vehicle.

I suppose that fundamentally, there is no substitute for face-to-face networking. The problem, of course, is that for people who do not control resources, there is no practical advantage. If you are not making decisions that matter to anyone but yourself, you are not a potential node in a meaningful network.

This tells me that the way forward is to make oneself relevant — not just to one’s hierarchy (employment relevance), but to one’s peers. Being active in one’s community, whether as a volunteer or activist, creates situational awareness and the grounds for networking.

I find myself today with a very new question: am I relevant to my peers? Do they have an interest in keeping track of my activities? How do I even define who my peers are? In my case, the answers are all disappointing, and today I find that relevant.

Footnotes

1. Anne Lister was a Tory landowner and lesbian, who is the subject of the BBC television series Gentleman Jack
2. The Secret Diaries of Anne Lister, 2010, Elena Whitbread, Ed., Virago Modern Classics