High Touch, Low Tech
Remembering the beginning of a retro-tech women’s network
Hub Dot just turned three. We have opened in a dozen plus cities worldwide and have a membership of 17,000 women and counting. Back in February 2013, I had only a small inkling of what we would become.
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A few weeks ago a friend from London wrote to me about a women’s networking coffee. She wanted me to pass the info to my London contacts.
We had met when I was the American mom at the British school house door collecting emails a few years earlier. We became friends. Our children became friends. Out of London for only a few months, she figured I still had the emails and asked me to tell the other moms about the event. I did, but I also posted the event on Facebook. She had me take it down, telling me she wanted ‘high touch, low tech’ networking. I took it down and just used email instead. I giggled a bit about how email was now “low tech,” but I understood her point.
Old enough to have learned to get news and correspondence on paper — perhaps even the last trained to type on actual typewriters with carbon leaf — many of us Gen X women have only transitioned to email. (How many readers under 35 know what “cc” stands for?) And many of us have little interest in, and even an aversion to, social networking and its ilk.
It’s not simply that vitural communitation is new, but that it is strange. It doesn’t have the same rythum or the same ettiquette. It seems cold, impersonal, transient. Or in a single word: lonely.
We don’t have an outright aversion to the web. Take news. Many figure — correctly — that if we could just figure out where to go, that the web is a more efficient source of news. But we like neat and clean, and we want substance. Since news services have the same problem as the porn industry, that is, free availability, websites fill our pages with little bites of info and advertisements and often get revenue based on metrics that no one really understands. (More here.) The result is just a barrage of visual noise that repels.
Yes, HuffPo and The Daily Mail have wildly successful websites, but there is an unserved audience that those information gristle mills will never reach. And although I’ve seen many discussions and changes aimed at attracting more viewers for websites, the seekers always pull from the stash of people already on the web. Considering their political impact, I am frankly surprised by what little effort sites make to reach the low-tech Gen X women. They aren’t there, and few seem to know it.
Retro economics
The same week my friend had called me, another friend and I were sitting in a niche coffee/wine bar—just the kind that could survive next to a Starbucks—and discussing the closure of another Barnes and Noble. We remembered the Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan reunion flick, You’ve Got Mail, which used the reality of giant bookstores putting the little niche bookshops out of business as the scaffold for the plot. But then the colossus, Amazon, and e-readers came along. The big bookstores added coffee shops but continued to lose revenue. They patnered with companies like Paper Chase and tried to prop up store revenue with stationary and stocking stuffers. It didn’t work. Now the companies that will thrive are Amazon, the colossus, and the niche shop—the little mystery bookshop with the good coffee, inviting seating area, and Tuesday and Thursday night mystery dinner theater.
So will it be with news. There is, and always will be, a hunger for no-gimmick, in depth reporting.
We seek substance and connection. In the new tech world, someone will eventually figure out how to facilitate it and gain a large and influencial following for the effort.
I’d ask for comments on these musings, but the women who would most understand what I am writing about won’t ever read this post, unless I email it to them. Then they might reply in an email, but more likely, they will bring it up for discussion the next time we have coffee. They prefer high touch and low tech.
By the way, my friend’s high touch and low tech London social saw 450+ women from all over London networking in a dress shop on a rainy Tuesday night. She had spotted something in her frustration in front of her computer. She saw the need to merge the old way of meeting with the new. She saw the desire for high touch and low tech.
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The next month I flew to London. I knew Simona had hit on something. I was sure of it at the Kitchen Table. (Simona’s kitchen is the board room. We are the quintessential kitchen table business.) While creating our business structure Hub Dot expanded to Milan, Luxembourg, Antigua, and more. To the big events we added supper clubs and smaller themed events about art, parenting, health, entrepreneurship, and education. Over three years we have accumlated a press portfilo in many languages. I’ll probably get in a bit of trouble for using “networking” in this title, because, as the one of our Times of London features declares: “Just don’t call it networking.”
It isn’t networking, not the way it is currently understood anyway. Hub Dot is merging the traditioanl physical connections with the new vitural connections, to the advantage of both.
Leslie Loftis is a lawyer and writer and part of the Dot Legal team and the Dot Texas team. Our digital piazza is now open at hubdot.com.
