New word from BBC – keep your English up to date.

If you want to be successful in business, I’m told that it is very important to make a lot of effort to meet new people, to socialise and create a network of useful contacts which you can then exploit to advance your career. You meet and make friends with people who might be able to help you later on your professional career. This is called social networking, and it is one of the buzzwords in business in 1980s and 90s.

Well, with new technology come new words. After social networking, we now have social notworking. Increasingly, people are meeting people online using websites that intended to make social networking easier. These sites, things like MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, … have become incredibly popular. Most people use them as a way of chatting with their friends, and sharing photographs and information about social events – parties, birthday etc. Some people are even using them to provide regular updates about what they are doing, often many time each hour.  Well, when you do this at work, instead of many things you should be doing, it is not social networking, it is social notworking.

If you are one of those people that use these sites a lot, it can be tempting to check what your friends are doing tonight while nobody else in the office, or to see if your friends have put those photos from the last trip you took together on the site yet. It might only take a second … and no-one will ever know. My advice is to check your company’s internet policy and to think about your boss’s attitude before you log in to your favorite sites. Some employers take a very dim view about social notworking.