The New Socialization Apps

It seems like it was only yesterday, but it was two days ago that I took some exception to Charles Duhigg’s recent book about supercomunicating. 

By his reasoning anyone can learn to engage in a functional and profitable conversation with anyone else… as long as they become supercommunicators.

Of course, as happens with many slightly lame theories, this one misses the obvious. It does not define human beings by their places in society, their roles and duties, but sees them as autonomous human monads who can get along with just about anyone. Who can and who would want to….

It fails to notice that when we meet someone new, we want to know who they are, where they come from, what their reputation is, and where they do or do not belong.

There are lots of people in this world with whom you do not want to communicate. The economics of time management make you want to spend more time with some people and less time with others.

Yesterday, the Financial Times offered an important article by Bethan Staton. It corrects the naive simplicities of Charles Duhigg. Her subject was loneliness and her question involved whether we can find a cure for it by using apps. 

So, loneliness is a problem. If you need to meet some new people, there’s an app for that. You will presuably feel less lonely and more connected to your fellow humanoid creatures if you attend a dinner meeting comprised of random souls, all of whom are looking to overcome their loneliness.

To her great credit Staton concludes that these meetings do not really work to produce connection. Any more than dating apps produce true love and lasting marriages. 

Neither she nor I would suggest that it never happens, because lightning can strike in the most unforeseen circumstances, but the chances are, meeting people through apps, whether for a dinner or for an affair, fails.

The app is called Timeleft. It is working in London, among other places. One wonders why it is not called, Timeright. Staton describes it:

Timeleft was launched in Lon­don in Janu­ary after start­ing in con­tin­ental Europe, tak­ing its place among a new group of start-ups seek­ing to innov­ate a way out of loneli­ness. It defines itself against social net­works and apps that limit com­mu­nic­a­tion to our phones, stak­ing a claim to open­ing the door to something new and real — “the magic of chance encoun­ters” with “people you wouldn’t have met”, the web­site says. Its aim? “To com­bat loneli­ness, depres­sion issues, and broken fam­il­ies.

This random assortment of strangers seems not to have been comprised of supercommunicators. When the group got together people discussed why they were there. In short they discussed something they had in common.

Charles Duhigg notwithstanding, they did not ask deep, probing questions. They began, as most normal people would, with small talk:

To get the con­ver­sa­tion going, our table of thirtyso­methings has been issued with a list of icebreak­ing ques­tions. But for now, at least, we do not opt to explore each other’s child­hood memor­ies or views on whether friend­ships between men and women are pos­sible. What really interests us is why we are here. “Meet­ing new people,” says Elena, who moved from Mel­bourne a few years ago and works in the food industry, invent­ing new products. “Lon­don’s a lonely city.”

And yet, these people had little in common. A group of random strangers will surely share some qualities, but none of them will be connected to anyone you know. This means, you do not know whether or not you can trust them.

From small talk about white-col­lar jobs in tech and HR, it is dif­fi­cult to know what else we have in com­mon. The thread that runs through every­one’s story, woven into dif­fer­ent cloth, is the desire for con­nec­tion.

We connect less because we belong to fewer social organizations. We do not attend religious services and as Robert Putnam famously explained, we no longer join bowling leagues. 

As though on cue, Abigail Shrier has a new book called Bad Therapy. According to the excerpt from The Daily Mail, people today are alone and detached, lacking connection with other human beings, because they have been brought up according to therapy. Nothing quite like therapy to turn you into a self-absorbed, self-involved, detached human monad-- craving connection.

Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, the younger generation, the one that is trying out socialization apps, is disillusioned with dating apps.

Tired of con­stant scrolling, stil­ted meet­ings and the per­petu­ally elu­sive prom­ise of true love, users are dis­il­lu­sioned: a small US sur­vey last year found that nearly 80 per cent of respond­ents exper­i­enced “emo­tional fatigue or burnout” when online dat­ing. 

One professor has offered an explanation for dating app fatigue:

At Ari­zona State Uni­versity’s rela­tion­ships and tech­no­logy lab, pro­fessor Liesel Shar­abi explains that dat­ing apps are effect­ive in broad­en­ing the pool of poten­tial part­ners, increas­ing the chance of meet­ing someone. But they can also cre­ate a loop of dis­ap­point­ment. People, she says, are “sick of swip­ing, sick of hav­ing these con­ver­sa­tions that don’t go any­where”. They want to actu­ally “meet new people instead of spend­ing all their time on the apps”.

It might well be, as Staton points out, that we have too many options. Swarthmore psychologist Barry Schwartz famously showed that we are more likely to make good decisions when we have fewer options. 

The prob­lem here is the para­dox of choice. In a clas­sic study, people shop­ping for gro­cer­ies were presen­ted with two dis­plays of jam, one with 24 vari­et­ies, the other with six. Although more were drawn to the stall with two dozen jams, those given fewer options were more likely to make a pur­chase, and be happy with it when they did. This, says Shar­abi, shows the over­whelm­ing effect cre­ated by apps that offer quant­ity but little improve­ment in mean­ing or qual­ity, and that incentiv­ise us to keep search­ing for “per­fec­tion . . . because it’s so easy to meet some­body new”.

The process of dealing with a band of strangers is discombobulating and alienating:

But the poten­tially infin­ite pro­ces­sion of strangers, offered out of con­text by a machine, makes me feel tired. It makes me feel lonely.

Social net­works, dat­ing apps and meet­ing plat­forms now mean we can meet, and remain acquain­ted with, a seem­ingly infin­ite num­ber of people. But all rela­tion­ships require effort, and when that effort is spread too thinly, it gets harder to be secure that we are giv­ing the people who need us what they need, or get­ting it ourselves.

And, she closes with the following astute observation. Why would you choose to meet more strangers instead of working to get to know those you just met:

It’s not a bad idea. Although my Valentine’s Day com­pan­ions cre­ated a What­s­App group to stay in touch, I think we would struggle to find a date to meet again, and a one-to-one might be too much. But I would be happy to sit next to any of them at another din­ner. It would cre­ate famili­ar­ity, a step, per­haps, to real friend­ship. Still, I’m not quite sure I need an app for that. And if loneli­ness really is the prob­lem, I have to ask myself why I would rather meet yet another group of strangers than get to know these ones a bit bet­ter.

Working to get to know people with whom you have very little in common, working to get to know their friends and the friends of their friends, feels fruitless. 

But it is tir­ing to hang out with strangers. It is tir­ing to con­stantly be cal­ib­rat­ing what can be said and not said, to see your­self reflec­ted in the eyes of people you don’t know. I know this is the cost of mak­ing friends, and con­nect­ing with people. But as my new com­pan­ions dis­cussed their plans to book for the fol­low­ing week’s Timeleft, I wondered what desires these weekly intro­duc­tions would sat­isfy. It is enjoy­able to meet new people, but is it a fix for loneli­ness? How many strangers are enough?

And besides, when you have no one in common you will have less concern for your reputation. And that means, you will not necessarily be on very good behavior. If you can get away with being rude, crude and lewd, the chances are that you will try to do so.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.