[i \ PACIFIC NORTHWEST BIOREGION REPORT Oregon Historical Society Weaving Networks in the 1970s by Steve Johnson From the vantage point of the 1980s, the 1960s may seem like an anomaly, a time when political action took center stage. It was cool, and even mandatory, to be politically active, hopeful, mad, and idealistic. Critical to the psychic sustenance of the thousands of isolated individuals going through fundamental consciousness-changing were the events: the civil rights and anti-war demonstrations, as well as the complementary but more anarchistic rock concerts, such as Woodstock. The popular media decided shortly after the Kent State killings that the sbcties had died— that the thousands of rebellious youth had cut their hair and settled into mainstream life. But from this vantage point, the sixties can also be seen as a mere warming up for the seventies, when the activists, told to "put up or shut up," did just that by creating new models for the kind of improved society that had seemed possible in the sixhes. It was, after all, the seventies and not the sbcties that spawned the countless new cooperatives and public interest organizations, and it was the seventies when the young (but aging) veterans of the demonstration era settled down to the kind of work they hoped would lead to a socially just and habitable planet. Key to the seventies were the conferences and other hybrid events that became a way for isolated individuals and groups to meet one another, share ideas, and form connections between each other based on common interests. The connections eventually became known as "networks," and the art of forming the connections came to be called "networking." By the mid-seventies, conferences and events had become an end in themselves, with relatively sophisticated techniques developed to increase the potential networking. These techniques included production of people- to-people directories, assimilation of countless mailing lists, and even creation of special networking job roles. The Pacific Northwest, blessed
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz