I can reach more people before breakfast than my grandparents might have contacted in a month. I can send photographs across countries, speak to somebody thousands of miles away and receive a message from an old acquaintance I had nearly forgotten. These are remarkable conveniences. I am glad they exist.
Yet convenience has managed to disguise a rather awkward possibility. We can spend most of the day in communication and reach bedtime feeling that we have scarcely been with anybody.
A message is not an inferior form of friendship. Sometimes it is exactly what we need. A few words from somebody who remembers us can change an otherwise miserable afternoon. The problem is expecting every kind of human closeness to fit the size and speed of a notification.
There are conversations that need hesitation. Someone begins to explain what is troubling them, changes their mind, starts again and eventually says something neither person expected. The important part may be a silence lasting several seconds. Most messaging applications treat silence as an absence of activity.
We have also acquired a strange duty to be available. A message arrives and its unanswered presence begins to accuse us. Someone sees that we have read it. A perfectly ordinary delay can feel like a social offence. Relationships become another set of tasks requiring timely completion.
I wonder how much friendship now takes place through the exchange of evidence. Here is where I went. Here is what I ate. Here is the view. There is nothing wrong with sharing these things, but they can become a substitute for telling another person what life is actually like.
And sometimes real company is inconvenient. It takes an evening, a journey, an interruption to our plans. We cannot mute somebody halfway through a difficult sentence. We have to encounter their mood and allow them to encounter ours. That inconvenience is often the substance of a relationship.
The answer need not involve throwing away the phone. I would miss too many useful things. We might simply stop treating all forms of contact as equivalent. If a friendship matters, perhaps it deserves an occasional visit, a long call without multitasking or a conversation that has no purpose other than enjoying the other person.
A full contact list is impressive software engineering. A handful of people with whom you can be entirely yourself is a rather more impressive achievement.