Perhaps Hiro Protagonist was overstating the case in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash,

when he predicted that programming a computer will eventually be as fundamental as having a driver’s license. Where the analogy does hold up today is in the world of online community. The growth of Facebook and similar sites means that organizing, networking, and socializing will never be the same. The Internet ecosystem is molding us and being molded by us, and you participate even as you read this. Don’t believe the hype. The best is yet to come.

Let’s start by anticipating a common objection to online networking, that it pales in comparison to seeing real people in the real world. My response: Online networking is to real-world networking as potato chips are to potatoes. It isn’t impersonal or anti face-time, just a better way to scale access to the people we care about. Many web denizens are also plenty gregarious in meatspace, and will be the first to admit there are those things you can accomplish online and other times when – as one Le Tigre song said – you need to get off the Internet.

For The Win: Read it!

I thought a lot about the power of networking lately, reading Cory Doctorow’s newest book, For The Win. Doctorow is one of my favorite living writers. He produced two incredible young-adult (YA) novels, beginning in 2008 with Little Brother and followed this year by For The Win. Doctorow is like grit in the oyster for companies like Apple and Sony pushing proprietary technology that leans toward monopoly computing, and he likes to shine hard lights on institutions he sees as abusing the public trust. An embarrassing little episode in the Pennsylvania school system earlier this year demonstrates that truth is even stranger than Doctorow’s fiction… The thread between Doctorow’s YA books, his yawps against oppressive technology, and online networking, is that people like him believe digital rights are worth protecting.

For The Win follows a group of young online gamers as they mobilize around the world against real-life work conditions that are undignified, reprehensible, and illegal. If this sounds like a nice science-fiction premise, wake up to the reality of gold farming. The global economy, after warming up on textiles and other items littering the shelves at Target, has figured out how to leverage third-world labor for profit in videogames. Separating kids in the West from their money is easy, since online games are filled with ways to spend real-world dollars on virtual items. When a healthy economy is established in a game, rules of supply and demand come into play. Game companies manipulate their virtual economies in the name of user-experience, but have limited success preventing individuals from doing the same kind of manipulation for profit. Doctorow imagines a time when kids duped into working as wage-slaves for bosses in cities like Shenzhen and Mumbai use the power of online networking and gaming to organize and rise up.

Cory Doctorow

There are plenty of heady concepts in For The Win, and beyond arguments for fiscal responsibility or workers’ rights, Doctorow constantly sings the praises of technology as a way to organize large groups of people. The social web of Facebook and real-time tools like Twitter extend our reach in space and time. Doctorow devotes a chapter in the book to explaining this, using the analogy of organizing a movie-night with friends. He argues that in times past, researching a movie, contacting our buddies, and meeting up was a major undertaking. In many cases, we did the internal math and decided the cost of all the effort wasn’t worth the value gained from the movie. Networking, the Web, and mobile tech make it easier than ever to bring people together. Lower thresholds for organizing mean greater social and community action, making it easier than ever to roll your own small social outing or massive protest march.

LinkedIn: Utility Player

Socializing, revolution, and online networking are kissing cousins, but don’t discount purely practical tools. According to the statistics, all of us are on Facebook already and those of us still living at home with our parents are hanging out on MySpace. An interesting post-social site you may not have spent much time on is LinkedIn. It’s not that this site isn’t social, it’s just more buttoned down. Calling it a sanitized Facebook isn’t quite accurate, since most other networks do feel like they’re on training wheels compared to Zuckerberg’s behemoth. LinkedIn has swelled in just a few years to over 70 million members and 200 countries, so it’s got great momentum. It has managed to successfully ape Facebook, has integrated blogs, and even provides a few interesting apps in what Doctorow would likely label a closed ecosystem. LinkedIn is a great way to find out more about companies. Company affiliation is the centerpiece of this community, nestled in a “trust network” where people use referrals for any purpose imaginable. I recently passed along an introduction to Sarah Palin that was wending its way through my network, proving that six degrees of separation trumps even political ideology…

I’m sure I’ve neglected to mention your favorite social network, so feel free to stump for it in the comments. There are more conversations to be had here about things like Foursquare, Flickr, YouTube, and all manner of social sharing. For now, I’ll close with a recommendation that you come at this online networking and social media business with as much of an agnostic approach as you can muster. We’ve started a group for AltDaily on LinkedIn, so you can give that a try. You’ll see some of the same content cross-promoted in that group, and you may meet some new people, or discover some new tools. At the very least, you’ll garner major cool points by adding the AltDaily badge to your LinkedIn profile. See you in the streets…