Salt Water for a Thirsty Man

I have been ruminating on the concept of a more organic contact book.

The original contact book was an often minuscule thing, with alphabet tabs cut into its edge, small enough to be carried anywhere. It held names, numbers and addresses; sometimes a birthday in the margin, sometimes a name crossed out and rewritten after a move. From it came the expression “having a full phone book,” which said something about a life: that it was inhabited, woven into other lives. It felt like a piece of yourself, and every page felt real.

I never lived in a time when that book was the only option. I belong to the generation that inherited its replacements. Still, I want to begin with the book, because in its modest form it held an idea we have since lost: relationships are something you keep and tend, privately.

Nostalgia alone is not an argument. The little book got lost and got soaked, and it could never tell you whom you had forgotten. I am not suggesting we go back to paper. What interests me is what the book understood that our tools no longer do.

Platforms like LinkedIn took a half-social, half-utilitarian approach. That double nature explains both why they are useful and why they are confusing, and the two have to be understood together.

Usefulness first, because it would be dishonest to deny it. In 1973 the sociologist Mark Granovetter showed that acquaintances, the people we know only slightly, are often more valuable than close friends for new information and opportunities, because they connect us to circles we would never otherwise reach (Granovetter, 1973). Nearly fifty years later, researchers tested the idea on LinkedIn itself, through randomized experiments involving more than twenty million people over five years. Moderately weak ties produced the most job mobility (Rajkumar et al., 2022). For those whose jobs run through the platform, the network works.

Then the confusion: the same tool that connects us also puts us on stage. Comparing the interfaces of Facebook and LinkedIn, the media scholar José van Dijck showed how each platform’s design shapes the identity its users present: personal self-presentation on one, professional self-promotion on the other (van Dijck, 2013). The interface moulds the people who use it.

The platform shapes the user, the user adapts, the platform rewards the adaptation, and the rewarded user is shaped again. Even the people for whom the network works are caught in this endless cycle of artificial relationships built on attention and traded favors. Reciprocity itself is ancient; Alvin Gouldner described it as a near-universal norm that holds social life together (Gouldner, 1960). What is new is the machine built on top of it, which turns the old gift of mutual help into a ledger of visible gestures.

Maybe this is the truest form of a professional networker. However, the thing that nags me is that it feels forced both on the publisher and on the viewer. Every post has to follow the same format, meticulously creating a thread of stories all organized in the same way.

Alice Marwick and danah boyd described how people writing on social media compose for an “imagined audience,” managing themselves for many publics collapsed into one (Marwick & boyd, 2011). The author writes for the reaction and the reader reads in order to react. Both are performing, and both know it.

You scroll, and the takeaway for the viewer is often absent. The design is almost smart enough to pull you towards commenting, liking, and reposting, even though none of it is constructive. The reason you post becomes getting that response and showing activity, instead of genuinely believing the post could be interesting or entertaining to the viewer.

The research points the same way. In a brain-imaging study of adolescents, seeing many likes on a photo activated regions associated with reward, and participants were more likely to like what others had already liked (Sherman et al., 2016). Among adults, a laboratory and field study found that passive scrolling, compared with active use, lowered how people felt over time, partly through envy (Verduyn et al., 2015). And in a panel of nearly two thousand Facebook users, one-click reactions and broadcast posts showed no link to well-being at all, while composed, personal messages from close ties did (Burke & Kraut, 2016).

I find that last study the most useful, because it separates two kinds of connection. Broadcasts and one-click reactions, addressed to everyone and therefore to no one, showed no link to how people felt. A message written by one person for another still helped.

The clearest evidence of this is the stream of new features LinkedIn keeps adding: salt water offered to a thirsty man, quenching nothing and leaving him thirstier. Analytics, advertising and daily games each bring users back through yet another channel, and each pushes the product further toward something that isn’t a net positive for society.

The best test of that claim I know of comes from economists who paid people to deactivate Facebook for four weeks. Those people reported higher well-being, gained about an hour a day, and many kept using the platform less afterward (Allcott et al., 2020). The effects were real but modest, and participants still valued the service. We stay attached to what does not nourish us.

LinkedIn launched on May 5, 2003. Its stated mission is still “to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful,” but that mission no longer matches what the app does or where it is heading. In its early days LinkedIn was mostly an online résumé and contact list. Now the feed is front and center, and thought leaders and influencers sit atop a hierarchy, the figures every power user strives to become.

The contact list was never deleted. It was buried under the feed, and a tool for keeping relationships became a stage for performing them.

Maybe the essence of this reflection is that social media was formulated for us to systemize our relationships and to expand our circle of influence. That message was only received by a minute number of users in the early days, and it is now overrun by a competitive cesspool of people consuming and making content.

Did the promise ever hold? The anthropologist Robin Dunbar, known for estimating that humans maintain around 150 meaningful relationships, asked whether social media had broken through that limit. In two large surveys in the United Kingdom, online networks turned out to be about the same size as offline ones, with the same inner circles of close friends (Dunbar, 2016). Our tools multiplied our connections without multiplying our capacity to care for them.

What we don’t tend, we lose. Following students as they left home for university, Sam Roberts and Robin Dunbar found that emotional closeness with friends declined when contact became less frequent, while family ties held up better (Roberts & Dunbar, 2011). Friendship, unlike kinship, has to be maintained.

We have never had so many contacts, and never been so poorly equipped to keep them. Our tools remember everyone and remind us of no one.

There is also the question of money, and it bears on relationships too. Apps need revenue to survive. What sells has shifted from the simpler times of buying a product for a lifetime (theoretically, at least) to a freemium format sustained by recurring payments. To me, this model feels more disingenuous, even malicious, than the one it replaced.

When you buy a product, you expect it to become your property. We are becoming a propertyless society, and people seem to have accepted it; yet that acceptance is not sincere, only a general resignation born of having no other option. The legal scholars Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz document how licenses and cloud services have replaced the ownership of digital goods, recalling the day Amazon remotely erased purchased copies of Orwell’s 1984 from its readers’ Kindles (Perzanowski & Schultz, 2016). Studying car-sharing users, Fleura Bardhi and Giana Eckhardt found that people who access rather than own feel little sense of ownership of, or identification with, what they use (Bardhi & Eckhardt, 2012).

I hold a market-oriented view. Yet when nearly every app converges on the same subscription model, the result feels closer to collusion than to competition, even though no coordination need exist and each company remains free to set its own price. As Perzanowski and Schultz show, the move from selling products to licensing them has shifted control from the buyer to the seller.

With contacts, the stakes are personal. If the record of the people you know lives on a platform you rent, the platform holds the thread of your social life. The little book in your pocket was yours. Can we say the same of our contacts today?

Edgar Morin reminds us that complexus means “that which is woven together.” A life is woven from other lives, and our tools handle that weave badly. They separate the contact from its context and the gesture from its meaning, keeping every piece and losing the pattern.

Morin uses the word reliance for the work of binding back together what was pulled apart. A tool built in that spirit would know more than a name. It would hold where you met, what you shared, who introduced you, and how long it has been. It would serve the relationship, and it would belong to the person who keeps it, not the company that hosts it.

Something purer needs to exist. Its name is Pollex: a nexus of contacts.

Pollex is Latin for thumb. The alphabet tabs cut into the edge of the old address book were called a thumb index, the place where your thumb found a name. Pollex keeps that gesture and adds the memory paper never had.

Pollex is a contact book you own, with no feed and no audience. It helps you remember who you met, how you met them, and when it’s time to reach out again.

It opens on a single, quiet home screen that leads to everything else, without a maze of tabs or a stream of updates. Your network appears as a web rather than a list, so you can see who introduced you to whom and where one part of your life touches another. Each person carries their context: where you met, what you talked about, what matters to them. These are the margin notes of the old book, kept and searchable.

When someone you care about starts to drift, Pollex nudges you to reach out, since friendships fade without contact. Its sense of progress measures how well you keep your relationships, never how many you collect. An assistant can help you work out whom to contact and when, but the message stays yours, because the composed, personal message is the one that counts. Sharing a contact with a friend takes a moment, as a scrap of paper once did. Your contacts belong to you, and Pollex connects to the tools you already use without taking that ownership away.

Pollex has no likes, followers or feed, so there is no one to perform for.

We are building it at Mergō Studio, first for ourselves, because we felt the problem before we could name it. We hope others will recognize themselves in it too.

Before you close this page, open your contacts, find a name you have not spoken to in a year, and write to them.

References