When Gandhi, that self-aggrandizing twerp, told us to be the change we want to see in the world, he overlooked the fact that people look at change in much the same way as sumo wrestlers look at proposals to attend fat camp.

Take Facebook’s latest redesign. When the changes went out in late September, the Internet echoed with a wailing and gnashing of teeth unheard since Rebecca Black let us know that she was partyin’, partyin’ (yeah) . You’d think Mark Zuckerberg had amended the U.S. Constitution through fiat or murdered the cast of Seinfeld or otherwise vandalized some sacred, abiding cultural institution. The fierce attachment these reactions illustrate might suggest that Facebook has been a part of our lives for eons.

And in a way, it has – not the site itself, but the ideas it trades on. In fact, all modern social media isn’t really modern at all. The terms go back about a century. L.J. Hanifan coined the term “social capital” in 1916. Victorian polymath Francis Galton calculated the mean of all guesses for an ox’s weight at an English livestock fair, coming up with 1,198 pounds – just one pound over the measured weight. We’d call this crowdsourcing today. (Galton, incidentally, also invented the concept of statistical correlation.)

But as Pamela Laird points out, actual social networking probably began when loincloths trumped lounge suits for fashion and utility. “The phenomenon goes back to the earliest humanity,” says Laird, a professor of history at the University of Colorado Denver. “Interactions are at the core of human activities.”

Laird’s research focuses on business history. Her most recent book, Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin, explores the informal networks of mentoring and social capital that played a role in the fortunes of figures like Franklin, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay.

She says we’ve always used social networking to determine who to trust. Before the advent of complicated social organizations, Laird says, this choice was forced. You trusted those you saw every day, most of whom you’d known since childhood. The advent of guilds, political parties, trade associations and eventually corporations forced social relations to become more formal and contractual.

But according to Laird, these rules really only applied to low-level positions within organizations. “Social capital remains as the primary way of determining who has the opportunities to prove themselves at the upper levels,” she says.

Jonathan Salem Baskin agrees with Laird’s early dating of the start of social networking. “That’s the basic premise of society,” he says. “Socius is the Latin root for ‘society,’ for ‘social.’ The networks are old.” Baskin’s latest book, Histories of Social Media, argues that every idea animating modern social media springs from an ancient lineage. He connects Andrew Carnegie’s public libraries with the information overload often associated with the Internet. The famously hideous Ford Edsel, says Baskin, is a great example of the perils of crowdsourcing.

Baskin also draws interesting parallels between the often-spurious entertainment offered through YouTube and the gladiatorial combats of ancient Rome. “Giving citizens entertainment with no substance is a great way to rob them of their political power,” he says. “In the evolution from republic to empire, as the emperors were grabbing more and more power and destroying democratic institutions, the role of coliseum entertainment grew.”

Not that Sergey Brin and Larry Page are Augustus and Caligula come again, but Baskin does see some cause for concern in the modern political landscape. Baskin links the discursive populism associated with Facebook and Twitter with the tyranny of the French Revolution. The Revolution began with a legitimately democratic bent, he says, but that soon became co-opted. The character of the new order changed, though the name did not. Similarly, modern crowsourced social movements can get corrupted by demagoguery, according to Baskin. Leaders can “listen” to citizens through new media technologies and hear whatever they want.

Overall, Baskin feels that modern social technologies actually retard our traditional social lives. “One of the funniest things I’ve found about the social experience, technologically, is that very little of it is social,” he says. “It’s far more solitary than most historical social activities.”

We might be more alone than ever – or maybe we were always alone. The philosophical idea of friendship, according to D.E. Wittkower, has been historically dominated by one man. “As soon as we start talking about friends, the primary source that will come up will be Aristotle,” says Wittkower, a philosopher who teaches at Old Dominion University in Virginia and writes books like Facebook and Philosophy: What’s on Your Mind?

Though Aristotle posited three kinds of friendship (friendships of utility, pleasure and virtue), he only thought friendships of virtue were worthwhile. An Aristotelian conception of friendship is a little different than the loose ties created through Facebook.

Wittkower thinks this is a silly way to think about friendship, but he acknowledges that it has dominated philosophical research into it. A more sensible start date for Facebook-friendly friendship might be 1973. In addition to the release of Dark Side of the Moon and the passage of Roe v. Wade, that august year saw sociologist Mark Granovetter release a paper by the name of “The Strength of Weak Ties.” The paper argues that models of social networks usually deal with well-defined, small groups. Weak ties, while harder to measure, tend to connect groups with other groups and thus involve larger groups of people than strong-tie connections.

The applications of this to modern social technologies are obvious. How many of your Twitter followers or Facebook friends do you see in a typical day? Modern networking is easier than ever, which has undoubtedly increased the number of weak ties in the world. “But if you don’t do anything with those weak connections, they might as well not exist,” says Laird. “I think they’re a seduction away from building strong connections.”

“It blows me away, how stupid people are when it comes to online experience,” says Baskin. “Facebook is not a great replacement for a real network of real friends who are sharing real space with you.”

You can’t swing a dead lolcat online these days without hitting some kind of social networking site. From the ubiquitous juggernaut that is Facebook to the improbable continued existence of Friendster and Myspace to the awesomely-named Makeoutclub and Delicious, there are more ways to share the escapades of Chuck Testa than ever.
The amazing proliferation of social networking in recent years might seem like a uniquely modern phenomenon. After all, the Internet has only been around for a few decades, and widespread broadband access and smartphones are considerably younger. But social networking – like everything else you think is new – is old.
We will tease out this topic at greater length in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, here’s a quote-based quiz on the history of social networking. Note that some of the quotes have been tweaked here and there to make them more chronologically anonymous. The answers are below the quiz.

ANSWERS

“We should embrace change. Instead, too often we fight change. That’s the nature of organizations and institutions that hold power. Change might mean losing power. Forsooth!”
Jeff Jarvis, new media maven and Twitter curmudgeon

“The loss of control you fear is already in the past.”
Clay Shirky, new media intellectual and Tom Hanks lookalike

“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people – and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and president of Facebook

“There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each. This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other’s heart.”
Jean Baudrillard, postmodern philosopher

“The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.”
Maximilien Robespierre, French revolutionary and guillotine enthusiast

“We no longer need to engage in material production in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products.”
Douglas Rushkoff, publishing polymath and intellectual

“There is a fundamental change taking place in terms of how corporations create value and arguably, in terms of the core architecture of the corporation.”
Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

“The analysis of process in interpersonal networks provides the most fruitful micro-macro bridge. In one way or another, it is through these networks that small-scale interaction becomes translated into large-scale patterns.”
Mark Granovetter, social theorist

“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher and possible victim of syphilis

“A friend to all is a friend to none.”
Aristotle

This is the age of endless internships, job offers that evaporate just as you get ready to sign the contract, and constantly shifting networks. Finding a new opportunity is no longer about simply applying to a posting or only about meeting one key person (though it doesn’t hurt). Which means that job seekers need to bone up on their math skills and combine two or more strategies to make a move.

Black Bird Tees resume T-shirts, via Cool Blog

Twitter + LinkedIn

HOW IT ADDS UP Establish your personal brand on Twitter, tweeting about the industry you want to enter, then drive people to LinkedIn for the hard facts about your education and work experience. Also seek out the Twitter-based search engines like Twitter Job Search, a beta site that lets you refine your search by such parameters as location, salary, job description and tweet frequency. From our browse it looks good for people working in advertising, sales and management. Sample positions: Sales rep at Molson Canada in Toronto and finance clerk at Vancouver Coastal Health Authority. Bonus: Looking international? Check out the nifty Google-powered Job Map widget.

+ How to Find a Job on Twitter, Mashable

+ LinkedIn: The secret to the online business network’s success, the Telegraph

Mentorship + Internships

HOW IT ADDS UP Finding a position is about who you know. But it’s also about what who you know knows. Follow? A mentor has made mistakes so you don’t have to. Pair that with an internship (or two) and you can bank work experience and a reference.

+ Deloitte Women’s Initiative for Leadership Learning, Alberta Venture

+ What to Look for in an Internship, Santa Clara University

Education + Volunteering

HOW IT ADDS UP School isn’t just for credit; it’s an opportunity to discover areas you’re interested in (and will likely succeed at) and make connections that take you beyond graduation. Volunteering in your area of education opens up your network, shows commitment to your field and might lead to your next job. One person from Ontario that we spoke with volunteered in a national organization with members across Canada, which put her in touch with her future boss, an entrepreneur in Western Canada looking for a second-in-command. U

+ LifeHappens: School, Unlimited

+ Online Education, Unlimited