I come from a nerd background, therefore one of my axioms used to be "what you know is more important than who you know." I ran for election last year and I found that our society values the exact opposite: fads, fashions and popularity are far more important to the general public.

While I recognize that networking is important in a business environment, I also noticed that much of it is not very distinguishable from the popularity contests of high school cliques. It is as if the world pg describes in "Why Nerds are Unpopular" continues in a far less dramatic fashion after high school: that we can escape much of the harshness, yet not all of it.

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html