I’ve spent a lot of time living in small midwestern towns. I grew up in State Center, Iowa, pop. 1500. After college and a few years in the Twin Cities I relocated with my husband to northern Michigan. As someone with traditionally “urban” interests and sensibilities, I’ve often felt like an outsider in my rural communities.
“Diversity” means we have citizens from every country in Scandinavia. The townspeople paint their houses in favorite team colors, drink heavily, and - depending on the state - celebrate either “Drive Your Tractor to School Day” or Opening Day of deer season. I would never say these things are bad, they’re just not really me.
Growing up, I had a hard time finding more than a handful of people who were “like me.” I loved school, literature, fine arts, and foreign language. I longed to travel, to understand politics and religion, to do something noteworthy with my life. Sports? Please. Just try being a 7th grader with “Quick” on your track shirt, running dead last in every race. Go ahead and laugh about it. I do.
I couldn’t wait to run away to my huge state university and lose myself in its blessed anonymity. I thrived in college and felt at home. I love my hometown and the friends and family who still live there. But when I go back to visit I still feel alien, nerdy, and not-quite-accepted.
Though I’m much happier living as an adult in a small town, I still envy my friends in bigger places. They can eat Thai food or loiter in Barnes and Noble whenever they want. They’re surrounded by people who speak other languages, who are interested in debate and politics, who read widely, who are ambitious,and who care what’s going on in the outside world.
Sinclair Lewis and Main Street - Finding my tribe
One of my favorite authors is Sinclair Lewis. By publishing a series of best-selling books in the 1920’s, (eventually winning the Nobel Prize for Literature) Lewis became leader of a tribe of people who lived in SMALL, but longed for BIG.
In his novel Main Street, Lewis brilliantly captured what it’s like to be a passionate, creative, big-thinking person in a small town. I identify with Carol Kennicott, the idealistic young bride who moved from St. Paul to Gopher Prairie, MN. Carol tried to get along with the good people of Gopher Prairie, but eventually rebelled and fled their prejudice, conformity, and gossip. She disdained their contentment with average lives and ordinary things.
I love social media and the Internet for connecting me with my people, my tribe, as we bond over our common ideals. But Web 2.0 has also lifted the veil on a truth to which I was previously blind - my friends and neighbors actually DO share my interests. I didn’t know they did because it never came up before. Or because I never talked to my neighbors. Until we joined the neighborhood block party on the Internet.
Several recent events point to this phenomenon - that when I turn to the web to find my community, I find more community close to home.
Example #1 - Juanita
Juanita and I sat in a very, very small Sunday school class together from the time we were toddlers. It was actually just Juanita, her sister Jolene, and me playing Bible pictionary in the church kitchen. I remember Juanita collected gumball machines, and we were in drama and advanced Spanish together.
When I re-discovered her on Facebook recently, I was delighted to find out Juanita and I have a shared passion – training and development. She is actively working in the field, and I am starting a MS degree. We shared some geeky enthusiasm about how much we love planning lessons for people, and vowed to stay in touch. Small world? You betcha.
Example #2 - Everybody on my block loves Dan Pink
One of my favorite books of recent years is Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind. You may have heard of it – Oprah gave it away. I found Pink’s work Online a few years ago through some blog or podcast. (Free Agent Nation is great, too.) I underlined pretty much the whole thing, and then shared it with anyone who cared (and probably some people who didn’t). You better believe I hollered for pure joy when I read in the paper that my author-hero Dan Pink was going to be the keynote speaker at an event at Northern Michigan University. The heavens opened and choirs of angels sang.
You gotta understand – I live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We’re far away from everything but trees, the Great Lakes and Wisconsin. Maps mistakenly identify us as part of Canada. Famous authors and world leaders don’t come lecture here. But sure enough, here comes Pink. Of course I had to be there.
I brought my friend Shelly along, and the speech was fabulous. But the story gets better! Who do you think randomly wandered in and sat next to me at lunch? (No, not Pink.) My neighbors! Literally. On one side of me was Kirk, a business consultant who lived across the street. My dog escapes to his yard. And on the other side was Irina, a lovely woman from Moscow with two young sons and an MBA in finance. We share an alley. My dog escapes to her yard, too.
Who knew these neighbors - the ones who wave to me as they’re mowing the lawn - were potential colleagues and kindred spirits? When your work is done primarily on a computer, like mine is, you can lose the groundedness and immediacy of real-world interactions. You can tend to separate the buzz of your Internet-phone-email professional life from the hum of your neighborhood, as if the two operated on different frequencies.
Example #3 - Jeff
Finally there was the mind-blowing experience of getting a really insightful blog comment this week from Jeff Larche. I started this blog two weeks ago, so any comment astounds me, let alone an insightful one. Jeff is a fellow internet marketer who lives in Milwaukee. He reads many of the same things I like to read and writes about topics I find fascinating. Jeff pointed me to one of his archived blog posts which includes this quote:
“In his 2007 paper, David Koepsell suggests the following:
‘The web could well be, and in many ways still is, a highly alienating technology, encouraging a one-to-one relationship with a machine that even TV does not encourage. That is to say, television can be watched in groups, and often is, leading to a form of community interaction that the web typically does not.
However, the emergence of social networking through the web has brought about new methods for otherwise alienated and occasionally isolated people to overcome that isolation, to build new modes of affiliation, and form new communities in both virtual and physical spaces.’
Koepsell suggests that no technology is embraced unless it meets some fundamental human needs. But do the latest technologies go far enough to begin restoring some of our society’s waning social capital?”
I ranted to Jeff about how ironic and wonderful it was to break out of my isolated, small town network and find a compatriot writing about that very experience. I thought, jeese, you don’t find people who think about these things around here!
Then Jeff tweeted me that he’s from Escanaba. (SFX: cricket chirp, cricket chirp) That’s where I live. Tiny, off-the-map Escanaba. His family lives here. He’s friends with my dear local friend Ann. I’m not commonly one to swear, but I cursed in disbelief.
My fledgling online intellectual community, which just grew so expansive as I gained a member in some far-off corner (yes, Milwaukee seems far to me), sprang back like a snapped bungee cord. Once again, my network was my neighbor.
Face to face
I think the next stage of my personal development as a networker, online and off, (ChrisQuick 2.0 if you will) is to figure out how to seriously connect with my network in real life. I want to do meetups and brown bag lunches with the neighbors and friends who share my interests and ambitions. I want to fly to conferences and have slumber parties with female Twitter friends. And I want to be part of a generation of Internet users who transform the perception that the Web is a place where people retreat in isolation to virtual reality.
We can use Web 2.0 as tool that allows us to find each other again. To discover things about each other that never seem to come up in conversation across the lunch table. And to spur us to act and connect, to go for the hug, the handshake, and the smile that have no Online substitute.
How do YOU network on this new frontier? What’s your advice to someone who is just starting out?
One last thought:
Even if you’re the slowest person in the race, at least you’re running.
