Harper-Thames on the Specific Theatre of East London Professional Socialising, What People Say They Do, and What They Are Actually Doing
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Harper-Thames | ShoreRoar.com
A friend invited me to a Shoreditch networking event last Tuesday and I went, for the specific journalistic reason that I had not been to one in two years and had therefore lost track of how they work now, and for the personal reason that I was bored and the event was free and included drinks. The event was held in a venue I will not name but which was the kind of converted industrial space that exists in such quantities in E1 and EC2 that the conversion of industrial space is itself the primary industry of the area and the thing being produced by the industrial space is the experience of being in a converted industrial space, which is self-referential in a way that I find more interesting than it used to be.
What People Said They Do
I spoke to eleven people in approximately ninety minutes, which is a networking event pace that I would describe as moderate — neither the frantic card-exchange energy of a finance industry event nor the self-conscious casualness of a creative industry event where admitting that you are there to network would be treated as an admission of something. The eleven people described themselves as: a “founder” (of what remained pleasantly abstract for the fifteen minutes of our conversation); a “growth consultant” (I understand this better than I did five years ago and still do not fully understand it); a “creative strategist at a studio” (the studio works with brands, the brands are not named, the work is confidential, it is going very well); two people who described themselves as “in VC” with the specific confidence of people who find that VC requires no further explanation in a room like this; a UX researcher who was at the event by accident, having followed a friend, and who spent most of our conversation telling me about a project she was working on that sounded genuinely interesting; and four people who described themselves with combinations of adjectives and nouns — “digital creative,” “brand storyteller,” “impact entrepreneur,” “community builder” — that I could decode individually but whose combination I could not map onto a specific economic activity.
What They Were Actually Doing
What they were doing, to the extent that I could determine from ninety minutes of moderate-pace conversation in a converted industrial space with drinks that cost the event organiser approximately £8 per person and were being consumed at a rate that suggested everyone had come directly from the office: they were looking for work, or looking for collaborators, or looking for clients, or looking for people to talk to who were doing things that were adjacent to what they were doing, or simply looking for the specific professional social interaction that open-plan offices and remote work arrangements have reduced to a level that creates demand for events where the interaction can happen in a room with other people who are looking for the same thing. This is not a criticism. This is a description of what a networking event is and what the people in it are doing, which is what all people at all networking events have always been doing and which the vocabulary of Shoreditch professional culture has aestheticized without fundamentally changing.
The UX researcher who was there by accident had the best conversation of the evening, not because UX research is more interesting than growth consulting (it is, but that is beside the point) but because she was not performing a professional identity for me. She was just telling me about a project. The project involved understanding how elderly people interact with healthcare apps, and the findings were genuinely illuminating and humanising in a way that the professional identity performances around her were not. She gave me a card. The card said her name and “UX Researcher” and an email address. No adjectives. No nouns-as-identity. Just the work and how to reach her. It was the best card I received all evening.
What Shoreditch Networking Actually Produces
The empirical literature on professional networking events suggests that they produce connections at a lower rate than their participants hope and at a higher rate than their critics assume. The actual value of attending them is less about the specific conversations and more about maintaining the ambient professional social presence that prevents the specific professional isolation of working in an industry where most people work for themselves or in small teams and where the informal relationship networks that large organisations provide automatically must be actively constructed and maintained. According to Business Insider‘s research on professional networking, the most durable professional connections tend to form through sustained repeated contact rather than single event meetings, which means the networking event is more useful as a starting point for a relationship than as a relationship in itself, and its value is realised only by the people who follow up. I followed up with the UX researcher. I did not follow up with the people who described themselves with adjective-noun combinations. We are all, in this, making rational choices about where our professional attention is most productively invested. The converted industrial space served its purpose. I will probably go to the next one.
Harper-Thames writes about Shoreditch professional culture and social life. Her homepage is at The London Prat.
For more East London professional culture, visit The Poke.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
