Social Networking has taken off over the past decade and has become an integral part of our society. Networking is nothing new, scholars have been doing it since the founding of the universities during the middle ages. When the English Royal Society was founded in the seventeenth century, it was at its root a social networking club, where scholars from many different fields met to share their work and ideas.
In modern times, the academic conference has taken center stage for the social and professional networking of academics. Attending conferences like the AHA, the OAH, NCPH, the GSA, etc. are just a few of the places where historians meet up to exchange ideas and build new relationships with colleagues in the field that they normally don’t see.
Facebook (and all the other virtual social networking sites like it) has now provided a place for academics to meet up virtually, exchange ideas, and host debates. The potential here is great, yet the number of scholars actively using Facebook for this purpose at the moment is probably small. This number, however, can only grow over time and just from my personal network of colleagues in the field I can say that things seem to be picking up.
Before Facebook there was H-Net. The idea behind the H-Net project was conceptualized to harness the technology of email to connect scholars in various subfields of the humanities. H-German, of which I am one of the editors, is one of the older networks (and one of the largest and most active as well). We currently have about 3000 active members mainly from the US, the UK, and Australia, but also Germany and the rest of the world. H-German’s heyday was back in the 1990s, when the flow of discussion was active and scholars (even the most noted in the field) were willing to exchange in debates about the state of the field and controversial books, such as Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.” For the most part, those days of heavy list traffic have past. Most of our postings are focused on our well-developed, professional book review program and as a conduit for information on conferences and publications. We are currently working to bring back some of that debate culture by moving to a web 2.0 platform, with discussion boards and other venues where members can more freely contribute (without the intervention of an editor, who is the gatekeeper to access the list).
I have to applaud the recent revamping of the Oral Historical Association’s website (which is associated with the H-OralHistory listserv). They have been able to build in social networking mechanisms into their own site and this mixture provides a nice balance between the push technology of H-Net and social networking. Each user is able to set up a profile, indicating their research interests. When clicking on the tag about one’s research, one can link up with others in the field who share these interest. My hope is that more of the H-Net lists will be able to follow the lead of H-OralHistory and move in this direction.