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How Networking Has Become a Hunt for Online Connections
It’s a never-ending game of making online “friends”
The impact of networking has rapidly increased given the rise of social media. With social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, words gets around much quicker than it used to, especially now that the six degrees of separation are more like two or three degrees of separation.
Social media has also made it significantly easier for us to find commonalities between other people because the amount of information that we now share online makes everyone so much more transparent.
We can find alumni from our university all over the globe or see a full online resume of people’s past work experiences. We can see where people have traveled to and when. We can even see where they are currently located at this very moment (if they are making it known to the public). And with these capabilities, networking itself has changed.
Networking doesn’t even require you to meet people face to face anymore — At least, not right away. We can simply set up a video call or a conference call. Or if we don’t want to speak to the other person, we can easily communicate by sending online messages back and forth.