The creeping rise of networking is just plain creepy

Getting out and enjoying yourself beats gladhandling, schmoozing and working the web every time

THE OTHER night I forced myself on David "The Hoff" Hasselhoff. It was not my finest five seconds. One minute the Baywatchactor was walking through the crowd at a function in my direction – strikingly big and hyper-real. The next my hand had shot out and I was introducing myself. Once the introduction was over (famous people don't need to explain themselves), an aching void of nothingness opened between us.

Never having seen Baywatchand fleetingly forgetting his other seminal work, Knight Rider, I was at a loss for words. It turned out he had already been waylaid by many equally gormless people. So he politely smiled and took his carefully coiffed self off.

Let’s be clear. I held no dreams of the two of us strolling down the beach in matching red swimsuits. Three reasons made me force myself on him. First, a waitress dared me. Second, displacement. The longer I spent with the Hoff, the more time I could avoid talking to the various sensible people in the room who might be “useful” in my career. I’d had a long day, and it all seemed a bit like hard work.

Third (and most shamefully feeble), it was a panic grab. If I ever find myself jobless, I reasoned, maybe I could use the Hoff as evidence of Hollywood contacts to another media outlet?

In other words, my motives for the introduction were a mix of fatigue, insecurity and desperation. No offence to the Hoff.

The recession has made me twitchy. Green shoots may be sprouting, but the tangled weeds of insecurity are pernicious. Who knows what is round the corner? The pressure to network – once a term associated with resistance organisations or technical grids – is on. Gladhanding, so the logic goes, keeps you in your current job or helps secure your next. One newspaper recently reported an increase in the number of university students seeking to join gentlemen’s clubs, in the hope one of the gentlemen might help them to get a job.

Lord Mandelson, networking king and comeback supremo, would seem to suggest they are on to something. While corporate spending has dried up, opportunities to schmooze are few and far between. Every encounter counts.

But anxiety can make people behave in peculiar ways. One friend, who works for a construction company, laments the creeping rise of creepiness. When times were more relaxed she talked to everyone. Gossip-filled lunches with the secretaries and catch-ups with the cleaner were a part of working life. But now relations are more transactional and functional: her attentions are focused on satisfying her boss and keeping up with contacts. She misses the cleaner, feels like a sycophant and is saturated with self-loathing.

Another friend – a magazine commissioning editor – is the object of affection, overwhelmed with compliments from journalists hoping to get work. “There’s certainly a lot more love about,” he tells me, although too much is a turn-off. As with love, desperation is not good. You may be gnashing your teeth, but no one should hear you.

As if seeking out flesh to press were not hard enough, we’re frantically working the cyber-rooms too: mixing and mingling on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. A recent report by Ofcom, the British media regulator, found the cyberkids fled social networking sites once their parents crashed the party. The place is full of grown-ups busily poking, befriending and accumulating followers.

Social networking is one more way for the professional to creep into the personal as we grapple with the protocol of letting our boss befriend us on Facebook. If relationships become more mercenary in a recession, social networking may make it worse. It’s an industry, after all, trying to figure out how to monetise friendship.

Organisational psychologist Paul Damiano believes social networking sites lull people into a false sense of security. He suggests some use them to appease their networking conscience – a proxy for going out and meeting people. Ah, goes the logic, I’ve got 1,000 LinkedIn contacts, I am a mover and shaker. Not so. Quality triumphs over size – it’s not how big but rather what you do with your network that counts.

On the occasion of the Great Twitter Outage – when Twitter was hacked into and users were unable to log on – newspapers wrote that the attacks left people "frustrated". As if social networking was so habitual that being unable to do it was like being locked in the house all day. The hack attack was reported as if it were a national emergency. One woman wrote in the online magazine Salonthat the outage made her understand she was on the brink of addiction – rather than interacting with people, she was composing her thoughts in 140 characters.

After reading her story I felt reassured. My big Hoff moment may have come to nothing. But at least I was out and about, meeting real live people (although I did tweet about the Hoff later). In fact, the evening turned out to be a triumph. I broke all the rules – I drank too much, stayed too late, hung out with the waiters. In short, I forgot all about work and had fun.

– (Copyright The Financial TimesLimited 2009)

Lucy Kellaway is away