"It keeps me in touch"

The loop usually includes other people. You see that your cousin has had the baby, that a friend from your old job is in Lisbon, that someone you were at school with has run ten kilometres. It feels like keeping up with them. If you stopped, you might worry that you'd drift out of their lives and they out of yours.

Part of this is true and I don't want to argue it away. Phones carry real contact. A group chat with your brothers can be the best thing on the device. So can a video call with a parent in another country, or a photo of the grandchildren that arrives at lunchtime. All of those are errands in the sense I've been using. You pick up the phone to talk to someone, and someone is on the other end.

The reach is a different activity. Going round the loop, you look at what people have posted. You don't say anything, and they don't know you were there. Researchers make the same split, and they call the two kinds active and passive use. One research team tested the difference. In a lab experiment, they had people use Facebook either actively, posting and messaging, or passively, only browsing. The passive group's mood fell over the hours that followed. The team then followed people in daily life, asking them several times a day how they felt and what they'd been doing. Passive use again predicted a fall in mood, and the route was envy. Active use didn't show the same effect. That was one platform, studied a decade ago, and I wouldn't hang everything on it. But it fits something most people have noticed, which is that an hour of looking at other people's lives leaves you feeling lonelier than before.

The reason isn't mysterious. What people post is the best tenth of what happened to them. Seeing it tells you a little about them and gives them nothing from you. It feels like contact and has the content of reading a newsletter.

There's also what the reach does to the contact you're already in. In a field experiment, more than 300 people went for a meal with friends or family. Half were asked to keep their phones on the table, and half to put them away. The people with phones out enjoyed the meal less, and the reason they gave was feeling distracted. The same researchers then sampled people's days and found the same pattern. When people used their phones during time with others, they enjoyed that time less than when they didn't. One study of restaurant meals doesn't prove a great deal. But the direction is the one you'd expect, and it's the opposite of keeping in touch.

The worry at this point is an obvious one. "If I stop looking, I'll miss the news. I won't know about the baby." You might hear a day later. I'd suggest that finding out about a baby by message from your cousin, or by ringing her, is better than finding out from a post addressed to four hundred people. For the people who matter to you, the loop is a poor substitute for a channel you already have. With the ones who don't matter much, keeping up was never really keeping in touch.

So the reframe is this. Being in touch is something you do, and it involves another person knowing about it. It's an errand, and a good one. The practical version is small. Next time you're on the loop and see something from a person you care about, turn it into an errand. Send them two lines, or ring them on the way home. If you wouldn't bother doing that, you've learned how much you needed to see the post.