28 March 2020 | New Scientist | 43So why didn’t previous pastors call people
on their birthdays? Well, if I had to use a
calendar of birthdays and then had to look
up people’s phone numbers, I might not do it,
or it might seem like a hassle,” he says.
The more I use the apps, the more I
am convinced they suit niche needs like
Luoma’s. It is also easy to see how PRMs
could be helpful to people who have memory
loss or who may struggle with social
connection. At least anecdotally, for now the
apps seem to be favoured by people whose
careers rely on intertwining the personal
and professional, and, unsurprisingly, early
adopters of new technology.
When I ask Wainwright to put me in touch
with UpHabit users, the first three people he
refers me to all work in tech. Edmund White,
who is at a software company in Brooklyn,
tells me that before downloading UpHabit he
kept a spreadsheet of his acquaintances after
learning that networking is crucial for success.
“I knew this was one of my weak points and
something I was not comfortable with,” he
says. White maintains 58 relationships in
UpHabit. Ironically, using the app has made
him need it less. “I now think about others
and will sometimes follow up without being
prompted by the app,” he says.
Despite the hype, the number of people
using PRMs remains small. UpHabit has just
over 25,000 downloads. Bazemore says Ryze
was downloaded less than 10,000 times and
Dex’s operations are so small that its founder
Kevin Sun sent me a personal email offering
to show me the ropes after I signed up. Later,
he told me this unusual move provides crucial
feedback for making the product better.
In truth, PRMs have been popping up since
2011, says Bazemore. “Once every six months
some venture capitalist on Twitter will have
a tweet storm about PRMs and everybody in
college thinks, ‘Oh, I can build that’,” he says.
Most of Ryze’s biggest competitors when it
launched in 2017 are also now defunct. “We
had a list of about 10 that existed two years
ago – they don’t exist now.”
Ultimately, it feels as though PRMs reveal
less about modern friendships and more about
the frenzied start-up culture trying to optimise
every area of our lives. I don’t doubt these apps
are useful for some people, I’m just not one of
them. How’s that for offered knowledge? ❚friend, that seems a little more mechanical,”
says Suzanne Degges-White, a professor of
counselling at Northern Illinois University and
author of Toxic Friendships: Knowing the rules
and dealing with the friends who break them.
Wainwright understands this criticism. He
says he doesn’t like to use the term “personal
CRM” as it can be off-putting to the people who
are being relationship managed. On a personal
level, Degges-White says she would “like to
think a good friend wouldn’t need an app to
remember that I’d just broken up with my
partner or that I’d gotten a new dog last week”.Remember, remember
Despite my difficulties, many people swear by
PRMs. Timothy Luoma, a Presbyterian pastor
in Plattsburgh, New York, uses UpHabit to
remember the details of his parishioners’
lives, in particular, to keep track of death
anniversaries. “The overall goal is to make
sure that I am taking good care of my entire
congregation, and not just those people who I
see regularly, or the squeaky wheels,” he says.
Luoma also uses reminders to call each
member of his congregation on their birthday.
“Phones are not new. Calendars are not new.Amelia Tait is a writer based
in London who specialises
in digital culture. Follow her
WO @ameliargh
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he was likely to lose touch with friends after
graduation. He also admits he had “grandiose”
ideas about taking on LinkedIn.
He acknowledges that PRMs can be difficult
to stay on top of for most people. “It’s a lot of
work,” he says. “The benefit is too vague and
too far into the future to justify all of the inputs
required.” The reason so many inputs are
needed is because it is really hard to
consolidate all the applications we already use- emails, calendars, Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram,
phone logs – into a single PRM. The apps can
also wind up feeling redundant. I didn’t bother
with birthday reminders in my PRMs because
Facebook has done the job perfectly for years.
Another issue is whether we truly want to
stay so connected. “By nature our relationships
are ephemeral,” says Bazemore. I’m happy to
naturally let some relationships go – I don’t
want to keep in touch with everyone I met at
university, for example. It feels strange to force
friendships when it may be time to drift apart.
As such, I saw no immediate benefits from
the apps, and the long-term benefits advertised
felt weirdly transactional. For example, Dex’s
home page promises you can “turn the person
at a networking event into someone who has
your back”. On a practical level, I also found
that I remembered the appointments,
anniversaries and anguishes of close friends,
making the reminders redundant. Setting
reminders for people I was less close with – to
ask an acquaintance how a work project went,
for instance – left me feeling more creepy than
caring when I reached out. After all, how would
people feel if they knew I was only chatting to
them because an app told me to?
“Most of us have electronic calendars where
we input our friends’ birthdays, so an app isn’t
that far of a stretch from that concept. But if we
are using software to remind us how to be a
Without meeting
regularly in
person,
friendships
inevitably grow
more distant“The reminders
left me feeling
more creepy than
caring when I
reached out”