“Follow me on Instagram!” is the new “What’s your phone number?”
Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I swapped digits with someone on first meeting. Only later, once essentially vetted through passive or not-so-passive observation of someone’s timeline, do phone numbers get exchanged. Even then, only if necessary.
David Marcus, who runs Facebook’s Messaging app, predicted the death of the phone number as one of five trends to expect in 2016, and the forecast rings true now. While we may not have done away with phone numbers just yet, at least in the social-media-enabled world, they’re certainly becoming less vital every day.
These days, most people stay in touch by “liking” photos, responding directly to someone’s Instagram or Snapchat story, emailing them or video-calling them through Facebook or Skype.
If and when someone actually does call you on an actual phone, chances are you won’t pick up.
“Sometimes, when I can’t get through to a friend [by phone], I’ll message them on Facebook and they’re more likely to answer quicker,” Ed Hutchinson, a 27-year-old real estate agent based in Los Angeles, told The Post.
Research from 2015 found 62 percent of teens share their social media username as one of the first pieces of information when meeting someone new. Only 13 percent cite phone calls as their first choice in communicating with friends.
“We spend more and more time logging into social media and keeping our communications within the social media platform,” David Brudö, CEO and co-founder of personal development and mental well-being app Remente told The Post. “Similarly, we are less and less afraid of presenting more of our identity across social media, making it easier to keep our contacts, memories and interests in one place.”
Indeed, there’s a lot you can learn about someone from their socials. I met one of my best friends on Instagram after following her thanks to a golden burger ring she had created (Goldie Rox is a jewelry designer). I got to know and love her vibe and what she was about by following her posts. By “liking” her photos, I got to see what her interests are, what kind of places she likes going to and the sort of person she is. She had followed me back in the meantime, and I guess felt the same: A few months later we met up, then swapped numbers. Fast-forward three years and we’ve been on several vacations together, and I’ll be a bridesmaid at her wedding this year.
For many, myself included, the notion of giving out your phone number is considered far more intimate than following someone on social media.
“When you share your number, you might not be giving as much visual access to your life, but you are making yourself more ‘reachable,’ allowing for more direct access and the intimacy of a phone conversation,” Brudö explained.
Social media is arguably about creating a false sense of intimacy. The big stuff happens off-screen — literally.
It’s also much easier to simply ignore or block someone on social media than it is to stop them contacting you via your phone number.
“It’s like a safety net in case the person turns out to be whack,” explained Klaus Derendorf, a 46-year-old, Los Angeles-based music producer. “Once your phone number is out, it’s out.”
The ease with which social media enables us to get to know and maintain relationships, regardless of geography or time constraints, is a plus as well. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve swapped numbers with people, only for their names to become random and meaningless in my phone book, untexted, uncalled. Following each other on social media allows you to put a face and a story to the name, and facilitates conversation based on relevant things that are going on in each other’s lives. Not to mention the fact that phone calls happen so infrequently these days that it’s much easier to get to know someone from their social media than a never-really-going-to-happen phone call. (Although, of course, face-to-face contact is always best.)
A writer described how he makes his (rare) phone calls by utilizing what he called the “Have I seen this person naked” rule, writing: “I need only deduce that, sometime or other, I must have seen this person naked. That clears phone calls to a wife or girlfriend, to children, to parents, to siblings, to old flames, to former roommates from college, and very few others.
“When a friend you’ve never seen naked sees your name pop up on his smartphone, he’s liable to think you lack boundaries. If you aren’t on this never-naked person’s contacts list, forget about connecting at all. Nobody answers a cellphone that blinks an unfamiliar phone number.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that many find social media preferable for getting to know more people faster (however superficial that knowledge may be).
“When you give your Instagram, the relationship with the people you meet can [subconsciously] be managed in batch, instead of spending time and effort texting or calling everyone,” said 23-year-old, London-based photographer Sam Pyatt. “Social media is a way to keep everybody up to date at once without committing yourself too much or sharing too much of yourself.”
But connecting on social media is far from just vacantly pressing “Like” into the ether. Research has found that people actually do feel more connected thanks to social media. Eighty-three percent of teens say social media makes them feel more connected to their friends’ lives, 70 percent with their friends’ feelings.
Being active on social media means you’re a lot more likely to interact with your friends more frequently, too. Research shows that 63 percent of teens on social media cited daily contact with their friends, compared to 44 percent of those not on social media.
It is important to remember, however, that what we see online is a curated version of someone’s existence. “Getting to know someone on social media means you are getting to know their digital identity,” Sarah Buglass, a doctoral researcher at Nottingham Trent University, told The Post.
“You are not necessarily getting to know the ‘real’ person behind the profile … You may therefore be forming opinions about the person based on skewed information (i.e., they may appear more successful or interesting than they really are),” she said in an email.
However popular double-tapping your way to BFF-dom is, not everyone is quite ready to declare the death of the digits just yet.
“If someone asks for my number, I feel like it’s more authentic than asking for my socials,” London-based Monique Burrell, the 29-year-old founder of online boutique mylaandanais.com, told The Post. “I think [asking for your social media] is a way of being nosy, which I don’t like. Get to know me before you stalk my life!”
Burrell went on to explain how in a dating context in particular, she believes the whole point is two people getting to know each other over a period of time in a natural way by conversational exchange. “I feel like using social media is unnatural and not a reliable tool as people only post one dimension of themselves: the happy, attractive life.”
“Most of my profiles are set to private so that people can’t creep, and I do that on purpose. Part of a woman’s dating prowess is keeping some mystery. The mystery is gone if my entire timeline is searchable online.”
Indeed, social media is arguably about creating a false sense of intimacy. The big stuff happens off-screen — literally. It can be easy to feel like you’ve caught up with a friend after scrolling through their Instagram or liking their Facebook status, but it takes more than swiping on a screen to maintain a relationship. That needs actual facetime, or a phone call, at the very least.
Sharing memes does not a friendship make.
Plus there’s something to be said for getting to know someone on their own time, and on yours too, as opposed to immediately knowing what they had for lunch last week, what their ex-girlfriend’s name is or what they looked like in a diaper.
From letters to home phones, from brick Nokias and MSN to being able to access anyone, anywhere, anytime, our methods of communication are ever-changing. But social media cannot and will never be able to replace good old-fashioned direct personal contact.
While a “follow” can certainly go a long way toward facilitating and maintaining relationships, it’s just as important to take those relationships offline. After all, sharing memes does not a friendship make.