Contemporary Authors

• Fully Connected: Surviving and Thriving in an Age of Overload Bloomsbury (New York, NY), 2017

1. Fully connected : surviving and thriving in an age of overload LCCN 2016050058 Type of material Book Personal name Hobsbawm, Julia, author. Main title Fully connected : surviving and thriving in an age of overload / by Julia Hobsbawm. Published/Produced New York : Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, [2017] Projected pub date 1704 Description pages cm ISBN 9781472926845 (hardback) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available.

• Julia Hobbawm - http://www.juliahobsbawm.com/#about

  ABOUT
  Julia Hobsbawm has transformed the conversation about modern networking away from the idea of 'working a room' to one which is more about how we live and work today on networks. She has defined Social Health as the antidote to the Age of Overload for businesses, government, and the individual. The ideas in her new book about Social Health, (italic) Fully Connected has resulted in over 100 talks, interviews, presentations, extracts and reviews internationally in the four months since publication.

  Julia Hobsbawm is Honorary Visiting Professor at London's Cass Business School and at England's University of Suffolk.

  In 2005 she founded the successful 'knowledge networking' business www.editorialintelligence.com and the ideas conference www.namesnotnumbers.com and the UK Comment Awards (www.commentawards.com). In 2016 she launched www.networkingnations.eu as a response to Brexit.

  Today Julia regularly consults, writes, teaches, and gives speeches and workshops on Social Health including its core components: How to manage Knowledge, Networks and Time.

  In addition to her books, articles and speeches, Julia is a broadcaster. She has written and presented two series for BBC Radio 4 and regularly appears on television and radio networks and podcasts.

  Julia was awarded an OBE for Services to Business in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in June 2015. A trustee of London's Jewish Museum, She is a Patron of The Facial Surgery Research Foundation and the Zoe Trust, and a Vice President of the Hay Festival.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Hobsbawm

  Julia Hobsbawm
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  Julia Hobsbawm (born 15 August, 1964) is a British writer and speaker on Social Health and modern connectedness and the author of Fully Connected: Surviving and Thriving in an Age of Overload (2017). She is Honorary Visiting Professor in Networking at Cass Business School and of Business Networking at the University of Suffolk. An entrepreneur who founded the knowledge networking company Editorial Intelligence in 2005, she was awarded an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in 2015.[citation needed]

  Contents [hide]
  1 Early life
  2 Companies
  3 Books
  4 References
  5 External links
  Early life[edit]
  She was born on 15 August, 1964, the daughter of the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm and music teacher Marlene Schwarz,[1] and attended Camden School for Girls.

  After leaving the Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster) without qualifications in the early 1980s, she worked as a researcher in television,[2] before moving into PR.

  She is a patron of the Facial Surgery Research Foundation and the Zoe Sarojini Trust, a charity educating girls in South Africa.[3]

  Companies[edit]
  She founded Julia Hobsbawm Associates in 1992, subsequently Hobsbawm Macaulay Communications,[4] in collaboration with Sarah Brown (née Macaulay). She now runs Editorial Intelligence, which she launched in 2005.

• The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/10/julia-hobsbawm-queen-of-networking

  Social mobility
  Julia Hobsbawm: ‘I’m interested in social mobility, and I think there is a stuckness going on’
  Julia Hobsbawm knows all about networks. The former PR, and daughter of a famous Marxist, teaches and makes radio shows about them. But is it right to revel in who you know? Zoe Williams takes her on
  Zoe Williams
  Zoe Williams

  @zoesqwilliams
  Fri 10 Oct 2014 13.36 EDT Last modified on Thu 30 Nov 2017 02.28 EST
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  Julia Hobsbawm
  Julia Hobsbawm has just made a programme for Radio 4 called Networking Nation. My immediate two thoughts were these: Radio 4 is obsessed with networking – I’ve heard discussions about male and female networks on Woman’s Hour so often that I now say “old boy network” with a faint Jenni Murray accent, and secondly, isn’t it mainly about going to parties and meeting people to whom you would have been introduced anyway, given that you were invited to the party in the first place?

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  The programme is engrossing, and networking is, needless to say, more than that. It has key distinctions: a closed network is one in which not only are most people locked out, but the people in it are locked into often dangerous norms, such as you might see among sub-prime mortgage brokers or tabloid hackers. An open network is one that breaks apart worlds that otherwise would be closed to those not born into them. Networking has formulas and laws: Elihu Katz’s uses and gratifications theory (UGT); Robin Dunbar’s number (the maximum number of people with whom you can have a meaningful connection, 150). Some of it is still just chatting; and part of it, I think though cannot prove, is about deploying your chat to make people feel good, while never making them feel so good that they know what you’re up to.

  I met Hobsbawm in the Groucho club in Soho, London, though it’s not the first time we’ve met. My mother and father used to clean for her uncle and aunt. That is a networking story with a political and social dimension, which we can talk about later.

  “You did some wonderful networking last time we saw each other – you introduced me to my own husband,” she said. I made a sheepish face. “No!” She continued, “It’s amazing, because I know what he’s like, he’s so shy. I know what it must have taken to get his name out of him.” I introduce people to each other pathologically, just so I can escape. It’s not personal, I just like to escape. I once introduced a guy I was going out with to his own brother. I wouldn’t call it a networking skill.

  The opening gambit notwithstanding, one of Hobsbawm’s key points is that, while the intimacy of face-to-face meeting is inimitable, glad-handing isn’t the point. “People think of it as a black book, and a particular kind of book – who is the more senior? Which is not how it happens. The world is not vertical any more, it’s on its side. What is important and significant, and who is important and significant, is very hard to predict these days.” Rather than ask what networking is, ask what it isn’t; everything spreads through a network, from diseases to the popularity of Kate Bush; some of this is very predictable, the way things start at a host or hub, then behave virally; some of it is not predictable, turning on the quirk of an individual’s behaviour or immune system.

  Hobsbawm persuaded me pretty fast of the profundity of networking, but I was left with some hard-to-shift scepticism about the forces driving it. By her reckoning, the answer is within you: you should learn how to make connections, become a cultural tourist, be curious about others, read things you wouldn’t normally read, step out of your comfort zone, share knowledge, treat your social network like your health, so that even if you don’t always do the right thing, at least you know what the right thing is.

  I think a huge part of what makes a network valuable to the people who value it is that it erects barriers to keep out the people they don’t know. Hobsbawm accepts the “human urge to upgrade”; the fact that exclusivity is prized and “everyone wants to go to the party and the after-party”. Yet she coins the phrase “open-source elitism”; we should accept that there are elites, but be open about their points of entry. Social mobility will result. She thinks of networking as a world of horizontal connection, where the old fixities of hierarchy – class, IQ, qualification, all those things people measure and count – are dissolved in favour of something warmer and more human.

  Julia Hobsbawm with her Marxist historian father Eric
  Julia Hobsbawm with her Marxist historian father, Eric, in 1996. Stefano Cagnoni Photograph: PR
  Her life has the elegant relevance of a novel, building up to exactly this worldview. She is the daughter of the titan communist historian Eric Hobsbawm, and refers to herself as a “dud”, a “failure”, or (my personal favourite) a “notorious failure”. “Even though I was born with a silver networking spoon in my mouth, I was a complete failure. I didn’t do anything my peers did, I was a real academic dud. My history teacher wept with relief when I got a B in my history O level, because she knew my dad.” She went to a poly, not a university (when there was still a difference – she’s 49 but for some reason says “50”, so this would have been in the early 80s) and dropped out.

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  After that she worked in publishing, alongside graduates who “thought that picking up a Jiffy bag for a book was beneath them, and I thought, poor sods, because I didn’t have that attitude. In the working world you make your own luck.” She fetched up at the BBC, working as a researcher on Wogan. “I do remember the sting of being written off. I met some Newsnight and Panorama journalists who, because of my surname, talked to me as if I was one of them. When I said I worked on Wogan, they all collectively turned their back on me. It was like that scene in Toy Story 2 where Woody’s arm gets broken. When you’re in the trenches and people behave like that, you learn something. And what it taught me was, ‘I don’t belong where they think I belong, but I don’t belong with them either’.” She self-identifies as an entrepreneur, spent some years as a “super-PR” in partnership with Sarah Brown (who was Sarah Macaulay when they launched Hobsbawm Macaulay in 1993), then set up Editorial Intelligence, which collates the newspaper columns of the day into a digest, as well as running an awards ceremony and organising events, including an annual festival-cum-conference, Names not Numbers. In 2011, she was made honorary professor at Cass Business School; after her inaugural lecture, the Guardian columnist Ian Jack wrote a piece that she describes as “saying, ‘great dad, shame about the lightweight daughter’. I was absolutely crestfallen. But it stung me into trying to explain myself better.” That explanation is part of the Radio 4 programme, in which Jack features (this might be networking rule No 1: don’t hold grudges).

  You could argue that these were pretty niche concerns – a person born into great intellectual privilege finds they have low status in that world, and tries to forge a world in which that status is collapsed. The flipside is that such a living, breathing pragmatist turns threat into opportunity: you don’t meet those very often. I’d rather have her on my side than not. Her energy takes her far beyond her own milieu.

  Part of the programme is set in Ipswich Academy, with Hobsbawm showing three teenagers how to network. “What they need is not friends in high places, it’s to know that they can go into the world and make connections. It is probably one of the most isolated communities you can get. One of the parents at that school wouldn’t let their child go on a trip because they thought they’d need a passport. Labour poured millions into their building, but what you really need is to teach them how to have a mind outside their immediate, closed community. I am not remotely interested in politics and the tribalism of politics, but I am interested in social mobility and social change. And I think there is a stuckness going on, both inside the world of work, and in that interregnum between finishing education and getting into work. They are unlikely bedfellows – highly educated corporate workers who get stuck as marzipan managers, and Neets [not in education, employment, or training] from Suffolk – but they are isolated, no one is helping them connect and be curious.”

  I have gone off social mobility; I think the proper business for society is to worry about conditions at the bottom, because some people won’t work their way up. Worrying about social mobility stands in the way of social mobility; the central idea being that dire poverty is OK, so long as there’s a route out of it. It’s not OK, and accepting it as part of life makes it harder in itself, and thereby harder to escape. But having said all that, some people who talk about social mobility I distrust, and some I think are sincere. Some have chosen it as their furrow and will have brilliant results, far better than people who talk about poverty but aren’t so, ahem, results-driven. “Speaking as an entrepreneur,” she says, “I like things to get done.”

  Julia Hobsbawm and Sarah Macaulay
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  Super PRs … Julia Hobsbawm and Sarah Brown (formerly Macaulay) of Hobsbawm Macaulay Communications in 1995. Photograph: Lawrence Cendrowicz/PR
  The downside of the notion of networking is illustrated neatly by her own Comment awards, in which the shortlists came under fire this year for being 100% white and predominantly male. She says 30% female; it’s closer to a quarter, but that’s splitting hairs. The more important controversy is the lack of any non-white faces. Hobsbawm denies that this controversy took place at all, which is interesting, because quite famous columnists – such as Sathnam Sanghera – were talking on social networks about it with widely admired up-and-coming commentators including Nesrine Malik: but you would only know that if you followed them. “We have literally 10 times more judges than any other awards ceremony,” she says, affably but trenchantly. “Democracy has its flaws. It is a completely democratic process that those judges make their judgments. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but I can’t rig it.” Sure, it’s democratic within its own network; but there was nothing democratic about the creation of that network, or any other. What you think of as an open tribe could easily be closed to people whose presence is vital, if you want to celebrate excellence rather than just the same people you always celebrate. “If you think you’re from a community that is underrepresented, phone me up and ask to be a judge,” she replies. “Why not? Don’t put a barrier where there isn’t one. That’s a mindset.”

  She’s not thought that through: at least as important as it is for people who are excluded to change their mindset is for the people doing the excluding to change theirs too, and maybe do a bit more due diligence on how exclusion works. Yet at the same time, in three years, I have no doubt she’ll have a more representative shortlist, because she’s adaptable and pragmatic. She’s the kind of person who makes stuff happen, arguably more useful to society than the kind of person who says “due diligence” a lot and makes nothing happen.

  The story about my parents cleaning for her aunt (a brilliant woman called Dorothy Schwarz, who keeps parrots) and uncle (Walter, who was religious affairs correspondent for this newspaper) distils this meeting point of politics and practicality. That is, undoubtedly, a network, a combination of happenstance and things-in-common that gives you an opening into a conversation, which is all you need. And yet, the Schwartzs employed my parents because they were Marxists who disagreed in principle with having a cleaner, but were OK with cleaners who were at art school. You could argue that their political stance, although egalitarian, was subverting equality on the ground, by throwing up barriers to full-time cleaners, who would otherwise have reaped the benefit of this network. You could also argue that the network wouldn’t have evolved in the same way, since statistically speaking, if my parents had been full-time cleaners, I wouldn’t now be sitting in the Groucho. Networks matter, but they don’t occur from a standing start; they are seeds thrown on the ground, and pre-existing conditions from soil to bedrock determine whether or not they will flourish.

  But from the perspective of the queen of networks, these are constipated, 20th-century arguments. She’s interested in the moment that happens between two people, “the minute someone looks you in the eye and engages you and your cortisol levels drop, and you feel OK”. That is more important than systemic difference, and more important than systems analysis. “People have been so obsessed with social networks that they really haven’t noticed the human side, the non-algorithm side, is still where it’s at.”

  • The first episode of Julia Hobsbawm’s Networking Nation is on Radio 4, Monday, 1.45pm

• Evening Standard - https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/books/julie-hobsbawm-on-her-new-book-fully-connected-and-the-art-of-hexagon-thinking-a3519296.html

  Lifestyle › Books
  Julia Hobsbawm on her new book Fully Connected and the art of 'hexagon thinking'
  First she taught us to network, now Julia Hobsbawm is tackling ‘social health’. With a new book on schmoozing in the age of overload, she tells Katie Law why the answer is ‘hexagon thinking’

  KATIE LAW
  Thursday 20 April 2017 13:32
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  Julia Hobsbawm comes to our interview accompanied by her 16-year-old daughter Anoushka and, with ebullient self-confidence, flings her handbag on the table and rushes off to the loo, taking Anoushka, who is doing media studies at school and has “come to observe”, with her. We meet in a private room at Henry Wood House, London’s favourite shared office hub near Oxford Circus, a perfect venue for the world’s first and only professor of networking, to do some.

  “Sorry I didn’t invite you to my messy house but I felt as if I’d overshared so substantially about my life in this book that I didn’t want to do any more,” she says with a big smile, producing a hardback copy of her latest book.

  Best known for setting up “integrity” (her word) PR agency Hobsbawm Macaulay in 1993 with Gordon Brown’s wife Sarah (née Macaulay), Hobsbawm, 53, has run networking company Editorial Intelligence since the joint venture with Mrs Brown folded acrimoniously in 2005.

  The following year Hobsbawm collapsed on holiday with such severe stress-induced pneumonia and septicaemia that she nearly died. “I was under a lot of pressure but I just sucked it up and didn’t connect what was going on.” During her convalescence not only did she come to understand her own physical and mental limitations, she came to see the need for better “social health” for the rest of us.

  READ MORE
  Julia Hobsbawm, London’s unofficial queen of networking
  Her blueprint for this has finally come to fruition in the form of Fully Connected, a survival guide of sorts to what she calls the “age of overload”. “It’s been in my head for 10 years and definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done, because I haven’t got a degree and I’ve got no discipline so I’ve had to teach myself and pretend I knew how to do it.”

  Her thesis is that we have reached “peak connection” and are “drowning in our own data”. With computers not just on our desks but in our hands, we have in effect become networked machines, permanently plugged into an endless bombardment of information — social media, emails, spam, texts — resulting in six disorders, snappily-labelled information obesity, time starvation, network overload, techno spread, organisational bloat and life gridlock. The remedy? Hexagon thinking.

  Beyond the jargon, Hobsbawm’s message is pretty simple. To connect with each other in meaningful ways we need to disconnect from our machine-enabled networks and reconnect through face-to-face networking instead.

  Being a professor of networking — yes, seriously — makes her impeccably well-qualified for such a task. The honorary position, bestowed by Cass Business School five years ago, is one that she seems both proud of and a little touchy about. “After I was awarded it I met Melvyn Bragg who said, ‘So you’re now the professor of meeting people’. I was so infuriated that I sat on this powder keg of annoyance,” she says. “I felt terribly rejected and misunderstood. He later told me not to be so thin-skinned — and he was right. But I still think it was an important moment because no one has any idea how interesting the science of networking is. It’s so much easier to talk about ‘working a room’ or ‘schmoozing’, but that’s not good enough.”

  super-pr-.jpg
  (Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures)
  Schmooze, she says, is simply a Yiddish word meaning “conversation”. “I looked it up yesterday. It’s funny that it’s ended up being seen as a bit lightweight. The problem is that the idea of networking still brings people out in hives.”

  Hobsbawm, who grew up in a secular Jewish household in north London, the daughter of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, peppers her conversation with Yiddish expressions.

  Like many outwardly successful people, she suffers from “huge” imposter syndrome, has “a bundle of insecurities and anxieties” and is petrified of public speaking. She bought the stylish green silk dress she’s wearing this morning “so I’d feel confident talking to you”. Why? “It’s body armour, isn’t it?” She flashes me another big smile.

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  Just two weeks ago she got herself into a terrible state, “weeping with anxiety” before a debate where the audience had to vote for their favourite speaker. “I realised to my shock that it was because I really, really wanted to win.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “It turns out that I’m incredibly competitive, which is odd, because I’ve never thought of myself as competitive.” Did she win? “I did.”

  She’s defensive about any accusations of being elitist too. “I defy anyone to give me any evidence that having good networks is anything other than meritocratic. There just aren’t enough policies in place. If we can help any disadvantaged person we will. But having a seat at the table is incredibly valuable. That’s why Anoushka likes coming along to these things with me.”

  READ MORE
  What 13 highly successful people eat for lunch
  But surely well-educated, middle-class children like hers are precisely the ones with automatic access already? “Which is what we’ve got to change,” She nods in agreement.

  So how would she change it? “You have to have people who are well-connected. Every person in Who’s Who should agree that 25 times a year they will take someone from managed networks to a meeting, to a lunch, to a party.” Does she do that? “Yeah, yeah. I would push back on this idea that networking is elitist. It’s only elitist if you keep everybody out.”

  Nor does she like being thought of as some kind of perpetual meet ’n’ greet party animal. “God, I’d hate it if people thought I was a fanatical work-the-room-er,” she says. “Obviously I’m a communicator at heart but it’s important to switch off. I love schluffing about at home.” Home is in Archway, with her antiquarian bookseller husband Alaric Bamping and their three teenage children. There are also two adult children from Bamping’s first marriage.

  When they got together, Bamping offered to be a stay-at-home father. “I hardly know anyone else who’s had that luxury. He does all the housework — I still don’t know how to use the washing machine.”

  As we part, Hobsbawm hands me her business card, which lists six websites and two email addresses beneath an image of her new book. “Look, it’s a double-sided, busy-person card,” she says smiling and pointing out the black and white hexagonal honeycomb graphic. “I got them done specially. See my hexagons?” Yes. “Hexagon thinking. See what I did there?” She sounds delighted. “It all connects, see?”

  Julia Hobsbawm will speak about Fully Connected at Trouble on Monday at The Groucho Club (thetroubleclub.com). For more information visit www.juliahobsbawm.com

• New Statesman - https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2018/01/julia-hobsbawm-s-diary-how-algorithms-sugar-are-making-us-fat

  OBSERVATIONS 4 JANUARY 2018
  Julia Hobsbawm’s Diary: How algorithms, like sugar, are making us fat
  The author of Fully Connected: Surviving and Thriving in an Age of Overload explains why she practises “Techno Shabbat”.

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  SUBMIT
  BY
  JULIA HOBSBAWM

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  January always makes me optimistic. The orgiastic fire of Christmas has been consumed, New Year’s Eve has been quietly endured, the shortest day has passed. Everything is only going to get lighter, longer, more filled with natural vitamin D. I am just back from mid-Wales where we go to tune out from the burnout, in a tiny hamlet in Powys with just 13 full-time residents and next to zero phone reception. There is no quiet like the countryside quiet, and who doesn’t come out of the city just to breathe fine air these days?

  For reading, I combined crime schlock with lit crit. First Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole series (I have annoyingly run out of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels). Then a quirky essay on hyphens in Stig Abell’s increasingly hip TLS. But my heart was won by Sybille Bedford’s 1963 marvel, A Favourite of the Gods. I’m not sure in the 21st century they make novelists quite like they did in the mid-20th century. Give me a desert island filled with Iris Murdoch, Margaret Forster and Muriel Spark to read and I would be content. (It is 20 years this year since Bedford appeared on Desert Island Discs, and her luxury was as classy as her writing: a French restaurant in full working order.)

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  Hen pecked
  I only really stepped outside for short walks to see our neighbour Marjorie, who runs a country kitchen outside her front door next to the churchyard. Each day she places fresh eggs and homemade jams, welsh cakes and fresh pies in a cupboard with an honesty box, all covered by chicken wire to keep out the foxes. Marjorie gets plenty of sales from the surrounding villages. Word has spread locally on the fastest network known to man – word of mouth. I note that she is a more successful entrepreneur than I am: her profit margin is close to 50 per cent.

  Intelligent life
  I definitely needed a break. Last year I extended the reach of our network, Editorial Intelligence, into Europe, with pop-up symposiums in Berlin and Amsterdam. But I also went to nine cities in as many months on the road with Bloomsbury for my book. I’ve notched up 100 events and interviews: authors today, much like politicians, are on a permanent campaign. Audiences and readers seem very keen to talk about what I call “social health” and why we need to manage modern connectedness as much as we do our physical and mental health.

  My book is partly a practical how-to, and partly a memoir of a career spanning Telex to Twitter, but it also covers the politics of the workplace. I’ve been a secret management geek since my twenties, inspired by an early encounter with the late Peter Parker, who once ran the British Railways Board. Management is to “leadership” what vinyl is to the CD: it will outlast the fads.

  Roughly translated
  I closed the year in Brussels, where the British-run Full Circle club arranged three talks and three interviews in 24 hours. The interviewer from L’Echo asked what my late father, Eric Hobsbawm, would have thought of Jeremy Corbyn. I replied that I was happy to tell them my view instead: that despite my being somewhat politically polygamous, I thought he was the right Labour leader
  for these times.

  The interviews with L’Echo and other European newspapers are being published now. I get the gist of French, but to read coverage from the Netherlands I needed Google Translate (and an emoji thumbs-up text from a Dutch friend) to realise it came out OK. The translation rights to my book have just been sold to China, so I am looking forward to seeing my work in Mandarin characters. Next time I am asked what I do, I may just reply: “Hoogleraar, ondernemer, auteur en spreker.”

  Face to face
  I spent the entire holiday fortnight not reading social media and emails, and as a result feel like I have had a fast. I have been practising “Techno Shabbat” for a couple of years now, using the traditional Jewish Friday night supper as a moment to disconnect from most electronic devices and turn to family meals and walks, and only pen, paper and talking until Monday morning (telly doesn’t count, nor does the odd sneaky text). Reader, I urge you to try it. With the news that the average active Facebook user spends 50 minutes online per day, it is clear that we’re getting obese not just on sugar but on the dopamine rush delivered by algorithms. The new obesity is infobesity.

  Siri, switch off
  The power struggle between mere mortals and the limitlessness of tech is dominating my thoughts. Books by my bedside include Noam Cohen’s clever takedown of all those pale, male Silicoevangelists whom he calls “The Know-It-Alls”; Geoff Mulgan’s Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World; and something a bit less hot off the press: A Barratt Brown’s 1934 The Machine and the Worker, borrowed from the London Library and chock-full of insight into how we tried to make sense of working life post-industrial revolution 1.0.

  I’m about to run our second series of “The Human and the Machine” symposiums this year, and start a podcast of the same name. No one can get enough of asking questions about what it all means. My money is not on the driverless car or the Alexa-Siri-Googlebox at home, but something else: you and me. Let’s not outsource ourselves.

  Votes for Johnson
  Back at work and craving respite already, I shall veg out watching Celebrity Big Brother. It’s a “Big Sister” edition, apparently on account of the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage. Here’s hoping that Rachel Johnson wins. As another “daughter of”, Rachel nevertheless raises her own smart voice above the fray, on her own terms, and gets my vote.

  Julia Hobsbawm’s book “Fully Connected: Surviving and Thriving in an Age of Overload” is published by Bloomsbury

Print Marked Items
Fully Connected: Surviving and Thriving in an Age of
Overload
Publishers Weekly.
264.17 (Apr. 24, 2017): p80+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Fully Connected: Surviving and Thriving in an Age of Overload
Julia Hobsbawm. Bloomsbury, $28 (256)
ISBN 978-1-4729-2684-5
Entrepreneur and media commentator Hobsbawm isn't antitechnology; she just thinks we don't have a good system for managing our use of it.
Society works on a series of networks and we thrive on information spread, yet many communications can be harmful. The process by which
we connect "the right knowledge with the right people at the right time" she refers to as "social health," while asking how we can increase our
healthy connectedness, and cut down on the kind that harms us. Too much connectedness is not just overload, but madness. Connectedness has
provided convenience, yes, but also a "radical reshaping" of the world and the way people live. Hobsbawm does not advise readers to
disconnect entirely, but to develop a system for better managing their connections. She delves into the full scope of the problem, from how we
connect professionally to how we connect romantically, and offers six techniques for swiftly making behavioral changes. Her detail-rich
writing is strong and convincing; this is more of a meditation on connectedness than a prescriptive approach to achieving it, but Hobsbawm's
thoughtful exploration is refreshingly low on tech panic and high on insight. Agent: Toby Mundy, Toby Mundy Associates. (June)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Fully Connected: Surviving and Thriving in an Age of Overload." Publishers Weekly, 24 Apr. 2017, p. 80+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491250859/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f289000b. Accessed 17 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491250859
Books: Out of the weak can sweetness come forth?
Management Today.
(June 1, 2010): p33.
COPYRIGHT 2010 Haymarket Media Group
http://www.haymarket.com/home.aspx
Full Text: 
Familiar networks cause group think, say the authors; random encounters work best. It's music to Julia Hobsbawm's ears.
Superconnect: The power of networks and the strength of weak links
Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood
Little, Brown pounds 13.99
This is the book equivalent of 'music to my ears'. Why? Because it lays bare the art and science of my business - the business of networking -
and declares it indispensable to successful careers, personal growth and enterprise alike.
When it was published in the US, Superconnect was chosen as the gift for the attendees of TED, that hallowed forum for thinkers, movers and
shakers (www.TED.com). Written in the earnest but easy style of Malcolm Gladwell-meets-Clay Shirky, Superconnect argues that 'by cooperating
with the network forces around us and harnessing them to our ends, we can swap the delusion that we can control the world as
individuals for the reality of creating in collaboration with other people'.
Its central observation, which I agree with, is that what makes networking succeed is not the 'strong links' of a pre-existing contact base but the
'weak links' of random encounters that, if acted upon, can yield jobs, career changes or entrepreneurial stepping stones that would otherwise
not exist.
Using an array of historical case studies, the book illustrates the point about weak links by quoting John Stuart Mill saying there was value in
meeting 'persons dissimilar to themselves, with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar'.
Given that I completed this review on the day that the Cameron coalition entered Downing Street, I think the authors have a point: cultivate
your weak links and you may get power: neither could get it on strong, ie party, links alone.
If you're a wine lover, then you'll appreciate the relish with which the authors identify the different varieties of grape and yield. They are very
down on certain 'hubs', the familiar networks, such as the workplace, that can create the kind of 'group think' that they say led to Watergate;
while being very up on what they call 'network stars' These are business models that connect people, such as Auto Trader. They describe the
'network tailwind that drives the firm forward' in such businesses, which they call 'superconnectors'.
Various 'isms' and social types crop up. Naturally, this is de rigueur in any kind of sociological management-meets-can-do book these days.
My favourite is 'Rolodex roulette', an embellishment of the term 'weak links' - meeting as many varied people as possible and seeing what you
end up with.
Which brings me to my only rub with the book ...
A fascinating and enriching read, it is predicated on the idea that most people are comfortable with networking. The truth is that many are not
My own experience is that the main barrier to networking is shyness and an inability to enjoy what the authors and people like me take for
granted - that it is fun and productive.
I would have liked less arguing of the main points and more analysis of how you can encourage this elusive elixir, rather than inspire people to
want it and think they can achieve it through osmosis.
Perhaps reticence explains why so many connect virtually - Facebook has a quarter of a billion users, Twitter has 50 million tweets a day -
rather than in person.
In an interesting chapter, 'Cyberspace - brave new world?', the authors explore the phenomenon of customers clustering around a few websites
with which they are familiar, mirroring what Koch and Lockwood call 'hub-link' structures in the real world.
They say that the internet brings about a 'terrific intensification of the communication and network trends seen before its invention'. In other
words, we humans behave in broadly similar ways, and always have done.
This is one of the chief appeals of Superconnect. It points out that networking has been practised throughout history and it has just got better
with modern technology. I particularly like the example of Diderot's Encyclopedie, which failed to take off fully in the 18th century, whereas
Wikipedia has succeeded at the start of the 21st century because of the vastly greater numbers of people who were able to take part as
contributors, thanks to new technology.
The authors, through a series of weak links, met while on the board of Betfair. They have taken a gamble that readers will be as turned on by
networking as they are. I sincerely hope that they win their bet.
- Julia Hobsbawm is the founder and CEO of the networking business Editorial Intelligence. www.editorialintelligence.com.
--------------------
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Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Books: Out of the weak can sweetness come forth?" Management Today, 1 June 2010, p. 33. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A227801469/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cceda3a7. Accessed 17 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A227801469
Books: Forget Twitter, it's better face-to-face
Management Today.
(Jan. 1, 2012): p28.
COPYRIGHT 2012 Haymarket Media Group
http://www.haymarket.com/home.aspx
Full Text: 
Dale Carnegie's 1936 self-help classic has been rehashed for our times. Julia Hobsbawm finds the medium off-message.
How to Win Friends and Influence People in a Digital Age
Brent Cole/Dale Carnegie & Associates
Dale Carnegie & Associates pounds 16.99
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Dale Carnegie, founding father of the self-help genre, is still enjoying it 50 years after his
death, and after some 50 million people have bought How to Win Friends and Influence People. I am particularly fond of the 2005 book by
New York's Carnegie Deli, entitled How to Feed Friends and Influence People, with chapters such as 'Statue of Chopped Liver-Ty' and 'Have a
Nice Sandwich'. And Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People was a highly successful reverse imitation and was even made
into a movie.
But now we have a curious thing. An imitation of the original by the next best thing to the author: his 'Associates'. I read the proofs in the
week that Amy Winehouse's posthumous 'album' of songs was released, and this book has the feel of both a sincere tribute and a clear cashingin
product: maintaining the brand with something 'new' after the star has passed away.
Here, it's 75 years after. The original blockbuster was published in 1936, a decade after Carnegie's first book, Public Speaking and Influencing
Men in Business, joined works by other leading US business thinkers: Walter Lipmann's Public Opinion (1922) defined the relationship
between a public and its information systems; and Edward Bernays' Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) looked at public relations techniques.
The thinking at the time centred on the questions of individuality, consumerism and the psychological and behavioural triggers that might
increase ways in which people earned and spent money, based on what they felt.
Dale Carnegie introduced a popular, pithy way of achieving success by getting personal. 'There is only one way in high heaven to get people
to get anybody to do anything,' he said. 'And that is by making the other person want to do it.' His heirs at Dale Carnegie & Associates
calculate that this message will still sell, with a little updating for the digital age.
His book has been reprised and paraphrased using lots and lots of reference to Facebook, email and blogs, and padded out with many
references to someone else's report from Harvard Business School, Duke University, or references to Abraham Lincoln, about whom Carnegie
once wrote a biography.
The essence of the book - a distillation of ideas about using empathy to connect with people and so having successful relationships in business
with them - is better summed up in the worksheet of a single downloadable essay on the www.dalecarnegie.com website by Kevin Sensenig,
global vice president of learning and organisational development at Dale Carnegie & Associates.
The rest is padding. Chapters such as 'Take Interest in Other's Interests', 'Smile' and 'Begin in a Friendly Way' rehash the central Carnegie
observations about how being nice gets infinitely better results than being nasty: 'From the political podium to the digital medium to the
boardroom table, the one who speaks in a spirit of respectful, unhyperbolic affirmation will always win more friends and influence more
people to positive progress than the one who communicates in criticism, condemnation, and condescension'.
But who is this book for and - this being a digital age - need there be a book at all? What about a series of online videos or podcasts or
downloadable tips? These may have worked better.
Yet inside this cynical piece of publishing are tucked away interesting observations. Take the point that trust, empathy and connection are
sealed better in person than via social media. In Carnegie's day, 'Face-to-Face was the expectation. Today it is the exception ...
What is your ratio of face-to-face versus digital interactions?'
So this ought either to be a rallying cry for how to do more interpersonal befriending and influencing, or have the kind of intellectual rigour
that Robert Cialdini demonstrates in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. First published in the 1980s, this book has recently
been reissued with a total sense of relevance.
Despite its best intentions, How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age achieves a reverse imitation of its own: it all feels
terribly analogue.
Julia Hobsbawm runs the face- to-face networking business Editorial Intelligence, www.editorialintelligence.com.
--------------------
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www.haysubs.com
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Books: Forget Twitter, it's better face-to-face." Management Today, 1 Jan. 2012, p. 28. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A276170051/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=18ab1c52. Accessed 17 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A276170051
The special relationship
Sarah Sands
New Statesman.
135.4792 (May 15, 2006): p51+.
COPYRIGHT 2006 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text: 
Where the Truth Lies: trust and morality in PR and journalism
Edited by Julia Hobsbawm
Atlantic Books, 224pp, [pounds sterling]12.99
Julia Hobsbawm is, by instinct and professional self-interest, a peacemaker. She sits comfortably in a world of forums and summits and
international conferences. Recently, she set up an organisation called Editorial Intelligence, which promised to bring together the best minds in
journalism and PR. It was a grown-up but false proposition, and naturally it ended in a great big punch-up. Cristina Odone, writing in the
Guardian, accused the journalists who signed up to Editorial Intelligence of being appeasers. How could the two tribes ever be friends when
they were founded on opposing principles? Journalists uncovered the truth and PRs repressed it. There was a hurried series of resignations.
Some journalists claimed that the commercial nature of the venture--disguised lobbying--had not been made clear. Is Editorial Intelligence a
microcosm of the doomed relationship between PR and journalism?
Hobsbawm has now edited a collection of essays, Where the Truth Lies, on the special relationship. The title is heavy with ambiguity: the
relationship between PR and journalism is largely hidden and slightly shameful, and the analogy of the mistress recurs throughout the book.
The PRs who contribute call for transparency, recognition and equal ethical status with journalists (the last is surely a small thing to ask).
Some of the essayists, such as John Lloyd, are known PR-sympathisers. To Lloyd, the vulgarity and hysteria of the press make it resemble an
embarrassing relative. Like Hobsbawm, he is attracted to commissions and conferences and exchanges--the mark of someone who has
fundamentally tired of British newspapers. Others, such as Peter Oborne, have a healthy 18th-century view of journalism: hacks simply exist
to cause trouble.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The most amusing, if predictable, part of the book is the exchange of insults between PRs and journalists. PRs, according to hacks, are
manipulative, dishonest and sleazy. Journalists, say PRs, are lazy, shoddy and drunk. I very much liked Sarah Benton's line in invective against
journalism--the more so because she is a lecturer in the subject. "To enter the media world of artifice, hag-ridden by envy and schadenfreude
and malice, is to agree to the rules of a game in which real facts are illusory and what matters is sensation." So far, so good.
The challenge to journalism's claim to uncover the truth is more unsettling. Hobsbawm asserts that public relations is now "journalism's
dominant source". Has PR become a kind of sat nav, rendering journalists incapable of finding their own stories? Is tabloid journalism merely
a matter of doling out cheques to Max Clifford? There is certainly some evidence that journalism's truth-telling mission is in decline. Diligent
back-bench MPs have proven more effective at unmasking political scandals in recent months than broadsheet journalists. There is also
unnerving competition from the public, and the Guardian's Emily Bell writes here about the relationship between journalism and the internet,
quoting Dan Gillmor's truism that "there is always someone closer to the story than you".
PRs may have become journalists' benefactors, but the gifts are not free: Julian Henry, an entertainment PR, writes candidly about the "casual
blackmail" that takes place and the loss of the "concept of truth rooted in neutrality". Moreover, those areas of journalism less affected by PR,
such as foreign and parliamentary reporting, are the ones being squeezed the most. We already know about PR's control of entertainment and
fashion journalism; the rise of financial PR in dictating business journalism deserves more attention.
In this context, Simon Jenkins's essay is a refreshing return to first principles. "Journalism best defines itself by a commitment to accuracy," he
writes. He warns against the distinctions between journalism and PR becoming blurred. There is no parallel. PR is about selling, while
journalism is not primarily about profit. I fear that he is deaf to the hammering at the gate.
The book does not answer the question posed in its title, but it brings together an impressive selection of writers (in the interests of
transparency I should mention that one of them, Kim Fletcher, is my husband) and, as Hobsbawm might say, it is food for thought. I
particularly recommend the essays by Janine di Giovanni and Andrew St George. It also reminds us that authentic journalism cannot be tamed
or subdued: it is hit-and-miss, slapstick, occasionally sublime. All the rest is public relations.
Sarah Sands is a former editor of the Sunday Telegraph
Sands, Sarah
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Sands, Sarah. "The special relationship." New Statesman, 15 May 2006, p. 51+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A146697408/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e7b5f6d7. Accessed 17 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A146697408
Books: Two ways to a balanced life
Management Today.
(Feb. 1, 2009): p30.
COPYRIGHT 2009 Haymarket Media Group
http://www.haymarket.com/home.aspx
Full Text: 
Julia Hobsbawm's warm sympathy or the brace-up exhortations of David Allen? Alix Pryde enjoys the Venus-and-Mars contrast and finds
value in both books.
I love books about time management. I just never have time to read them Both these books address the perennial question of how to cope with
increasing pressures in our personal and professional daily lives. But if The See-Saw is from Venus, then Making It All Work is from Mars.
Julia Hobsbawm's approach is light-hearted: she sympathises with the issue and shares stories about how she and others cope. By contrast,
David Allen provides a prescriptive manual for a systematic approach to 'stress-free productivity' in this sequel to his 2001 book, Getting
Things Done. It's sprinkled with flow charts.
I told my best friend that I'd been asked to review a couple of books on work/life balance and, after she stopped laughing, she said: 'And you
have the time?' By coincidence, that was how Hobs-bawm's friend reacted when she announced she was writing one. Hobsbawm runs her own
PR business - she was previously in partnership with the PM's wife, Sarah (Macaulay) Brown, both pioneers of ethical PR. Hobsbawm is also
a wife, mother of three, step-mother of two, daughter, daughter-in-law, sister...
The See-Saw is her metaphor for how work and life are rarely perfectly balanced. Usually one is flying high while the other is in the doldrums.
Implicit in that is accepting that what makes it all fun is the dynamic. As Hobsbawm points out, it helps to think of four dimensions: work,
family, partner and self - the last two being easily denied due time and attention.
I'm fascinated by how others organise themselves and always on the look-out for gems of personal effectiveness. So this book is something of
an Aladdin's Cave of Julia's and her friends' hard-won habits of success. The punchy top tips and the half-page case studies have been planted
throughout the book with such care that they can be read without distracting from the flow. The tips provide inspiration while the case studies,
frankly, engender a feeling of dread (which then turns into gratitude for the comparative ease of your own work/life set-up).
If I have a criticism it's that rather than focus on being a bible for the working mum, the book tries to be relevant to the working father and
working non-parent too. It ends up feeling a bit like a hassled working mother - losing power by being pulled in different directions, trying to
please everyone. As Allen himself would advise: power = concentration = elimination of distraction.
In contrast, Allen's Making It All Work is a dense, industrial tome, complete with aviation and martial arts metaphors. Following Hobsbawm's
friendly, self-deprecatory warmth, it was a shock to launch into its initial self-congratulatory onslaught about how Getting Things
Done has become a global phenomenon. In that earlier book, Allen set out 11 steps - five for managing workflow and six 'horizons of focus'.
He has boiled this down into two key stages: 'getting control' and 'getting perspective'.
Allen's view on work/life balance is that it's a hoax. His point is that it's about being productive across the whole of your endeavours, and
whatever that translates into in terms of the split of your time between work and life, then that's what's right for you. The Making It All Work
title is a deliberate double entendre, as he champions applying the principles, techniques and tools you would use in the workplace to your
personal life as well. Interestingly, Hobsbawm believes that applying such a mindset to your home life can actually cause stress - spending
time and effort calendarising everything, rather than, say, dropping in on a friend.
Once I'd got over Allen's US-style level of self-confidence, I found a great deal of value in his book. He has put enormous time and thought
into understanding both what makes us productive and what generates stress. So much of his approach rang true to my personal experience.
And at the same time, I could see why various techniques that I've tried to put into practice but that haven't been sustainable for me were
missing a subtle refinement that might turn them into something I can stick to.
These books address the same core issue but in very different ways. It's a bit like the choice between visiting the friend who'll give you tea and
sympathy or the one who'll tell you to pull yourself together. Only you know which you need at a given time. Despite their different
approaches, both authors promote the importance of being clear about what you're doing and why, and allowing yourself to let go of other
things.
As for my friend's incredulity about my taking on writing a book review... well, thanks to techniques that I applied from both these books,
reader, I did it.
The See-Saw: 100 ideas for work-life balance
Julia Hobsbawm
Atlantic Books
pounds 6.99
Making It All Work: Winning at the game of work and the business of life
David Allen
Piatkus Books, pounds 12.99
--------------------
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www.haysubs.com
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Books: Two ways to a balanced life." Management Today, 1 Feb. 2009, p. 30. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A193089171/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=15e8df79. Accessed 17 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A193089171

"Fully Connected: Surviving and Thriving in an Age of Overload." Publishers Weekly, 24 Apr. 2017, p. 80+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491250859/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 17 Jan. 2018. "Books: Out of the weak can sweetness come forth?" Management Today, 1 June 2010, p. 33. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A227801469/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 17 Jan. 2018. "Books: Forget Twitter, it's better face-to-face." Management Today, 1 Jan. 2012, p. 28. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A276170051/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 17 Jan. 2018. Sands, Sarah. "The special relationship." New Statesman, 15 May 2006, p. 51+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A146697408/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 17 Jan. 2018. "Books: Two ways to a balanced life." Management Today, 1 Feb. 2009, p. 30. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A193089171/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 17 Jan. 2018.

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  Fully Connected: Surviving and Thriving in an Age of Overload, by Julia Hobsbawm
  Book of the week: the digital deluge can harm our social health; Emma Rees commends a prescription to tackle it

  March 30, 2017
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  By Emma Rees
  Twitter: @EMMAREES
  Jewish people by the seaside
  Source: Alamy
  I’ve always had a bit of a thing for stationery. I look forward every year to the arrival of my new Moleskine organiser, my tabula rasa of order and potential. I almost immediately write down an aide-memoire for each spell of annual leave I plan to take: “Update out-of-office auto-reply.” I am aware of how tragic this confession may sound, but I am also willing to bet that you know what I mean – not only about the joys of an analogue diary, with its narrow-ruled lines and concertinaed pocket at the back, but also about the power of the little digital cloak of invisibility that is the email auto-reply. (I should probably stop the confession here, but I do wonder if I’m alone in continuing to check my email once the automated message is up and running, just for the frisson of finding out for myself who will have received it, and who, consequently, is simply going to have to wait a while for a response.)

  The auto-reply is a signal that, for whatever reason, I am stopping, or – at the very least – slowing down for a bit. And the symbolism of that signal is potent in a world that seems never to switch off. How to navigate the “age of overload” that so many of us inhabit is the project that is central to Julia Hobsbawm’s short but innovative study.

  As Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber wrote in last year’s outstanding The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, “it is not so much a matter of managing our time as it is of sustaining our focus in a culture that threatens it”. The irony is that part of the threat comes in the form of digital connectedness, the relentlessness of which necessitates better care of what Hobsbawm calls “social health”. Her book is in one sense, then, a contribution to the “slow professor” movement, and, in another, a development of the ideas about work-life balance that she shared in her 2009 work The See-Saw: 100 Ideas for Work‑Life Balance. “If my life were a household budget”, Hobsbawm wrote then, “I’d be down to zero every month at best, overdrawn every week at worst.” In the intervening eight years, she’s clearly learned a lot, and in Fully Connected she shares that knowledge.

  Hobsbawm’s writing style has about it an immediacy that one would not necessarily expect from a “business” book. It opens, for example, with a preface about the spread of the Ebola virus in 2014. The epidemic, in Hobsbawm’s persuasive formulation, was remarkable not least because it embodied both love and horror: in the early days of the outbreak that eventually killed more than 11,000 people, the bodies of the deceased were kissed and caressed by mourners, and this human connection hastened Ebola’s spread. Her discussion of how this connectedness led to tragedy is the perfect way in to thinking about how, as she puts it, “society is underpinned and connected by a mosaic of networks”. She sustains this powerful metaphor throughout her book, examining “how we manage the spread and containment of modern connectedness”, and advocating social health, in which connections are enhanced, rather than replaced, by technological ones.

  It’s a truism that progress is a Good Thing. It isn’t always. In this “fully connected” era, we should be enjoying the luxury of an indolence that our toiling ancestors could never have imagined. But we have become sick of our digital excesses, and sick because of our digital excesses, to the point where, in Hobsbawm’s words, today “we are learning afresh what it means to live cheek by jowl with another species entirely: technology”.

  To illustrate the lessons – which are at times very difficult ones – to be learned from living with technology, Hobsbawm gives examples of events that will be familiar to UK readers and that have entered our consciousness almost as chilling postmodern collocations: the Ebola outbreak, the Soham murders and the death of Baby P. These tableaux give the book an immediacy, exemplifying how connections and disconnections between people can prove fatal if they are misunderstood or misapplied. “I like the idea of the connected body,” Hobsbawm writes at one point, “with all of its bones and joints joined together, as a metaphor for healthy connectedness in a wider context”, and her recognition of the importance of “a family, a village, a community” is a reassuring corrective to the nakedly insular neoliberal agenda that so often governs books in the self-help genre.

  Fully Connected ends with “six main principles and practices to ‘takeaway’ and act on in the immediate future”. My favourite is disconnection, or the instigation of a “techno Shabbat”, since spending one day a week “to connect…with yourself, your family, your community, without the prop, benefit or accompaniment of technology is essential”. It was not only the subliminal power of the religious language Hobsbawm uses that made me want to shout “Amen!” at this point.

  The fully connected era is, for Hobsbawm, a health crisis that we have yet to address adequately. Those who have already attained a state of social health know how to forge meaningful networks and connections, and can “balance face-to-face and technology, and know where to find the off switch” – but too few of us have managed it.

  The book’s evangelical tone meshes well with the (sometimes autobiographical) spots in time that pepper it, anchoring Hobsbawm’s theories in a relatable, if occasionally overwrought, way. “Picture the scene,” she exhorts her readers at one point: “It is 1770.” Moments like this will not sit well with everyone, nor will some of the buzz terms she favours: I felt patronised (and a little hungry) by the language of “information obesity”, “time starvation” and “marzipan managers”.

  Similarly, Hobsbawm’s diagram of “the hexagon of social health” feels unnecessarily condescending, with infelicitous echoes of the recent spate of satirical takes on Ladybird books (specifically a moment in one volume titled The Meeting, where “The facilitator has used the whiteboard to illustrate the Hexagon of Unexpectedness”). And at times her metaphors simply don’t work, as when the “old, lumbering dinosaurs of the office jungle” confront “smaller, more agile bees”. At points such as this, I was left none the wiser. But there are, to counter such jarring images, plenty of insightful observations: “Even for those like me who have enjoyed the vast majority of their work, feeling energized, creative, productive and stimulated, it is still often a dominant, domineering, heavy creature.”

  The message of social health at the book’s heart is a vital one, and it’s one that Hobsbawm is well placed to share. I finished reading Fully Connected and returned to another book, Audre Lorde’s brilliant 1988 essay collection, A Burst of Light. “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence,” Lorde writes there, “it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Books such as Hobsbawm’s provide valuable ammunition for precisely such battles.

  Emma Rees is professor of literature and gender studies at the University of Chester, where she is director of the Institute of Gender Studies.

  Fully Connected: Surviving and Thriving in an Age of Overload
  By Julia Hobsbawm
  Bloomsbury, 256pp, £20.00
  ISBN 9781472926845
  Published 20 April 2017

  The author
  Julia Hobsbawm
  Author, entrepreneur and educator Julia Hobsbawm was born in London to Eric Hobsbawm, the eminent Marxist historian, and Marlene Schwartz, a refugee and a “Viennese-born girl in an ocelot coat”, as her husband described her in his autobiography.

  Named to a visiting chair in 2011 in what the institution described as a world first, Hobsbawm is professor of networking at Cass Business School, City, University of London. “Networking is a form of intellectual fitness...as invaluable to productivity and therefore economic performance as physical fitness is to overall health,” she commented on her appointment.

  From 1993 to 2001 she ran the publicity firm Hobsbawm Macaulay Communications with Sarah Macaulay, and in 2005 founded Editorial Intelligence (“where smart people meet smart ideas”). An academic career may not have been in her plans, as she was a reluctant student, she recalled to the Jewish Chronicle: “I think my father’s abilities cast a set of expectations on me that I never was going to deliver and a lot of my teachers were very evidently disappointed.” She attended the Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster), “but I knew that I didn’t really want to be there; I wanted to start working”.

  Hobsbawm has argued that networking is a valuable undertaking even for young people who lack money, social capital, a leafy London postcode and access to that inevitable euphemism, “a good school”.

  In a 2014 interview with The Guardian, she said: “What they need is not friends in high places, it’s to know that they can go into the world and make connections. What you really need is to teach them how to have a mind outside their immediate, closed community. I am not remotely interested in politics and the tribalism of politics, but I am interested in social mobility and social change.”

  karen.shook@tesglobal.com

  POSTSCRIPT:
  Print headline: Turn off the phone and tune in to the world around you

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