Aporia

Path is an impossibly beautiful social-network and app for the iPhone and Android; it’s the sort of software one daydreams about creating, replete with delightful surprises and deeply-considered design. Quite apart from its many visual flourishes, some of its nicest touches reflect enormous amounts of cross-disciplinary work, too. Here’s an involved example:

When you begin using Path, you select a “cover,” notably similar in purpose and layout to the cover introduced in Facebook’s new “Timeline” design. I chose an old photo already saved on my phone; it was small (500 pixels square), but sufficed on the constrained screen of an iPhone:

Three moments per month is pretty good, right?

With cover and avatar in place, I posted that I was listening to music; it let me select from tracks on my iPhone, and it gave me the option to push this post to Facebook and Twitter as well; curious to see what would happen, I selected Facebook, where very shortly there appeared the image of the Tortoise album I had selected and a link.

I was surprised, however, when I clicked on the link: it took me to a lovely standalone page with a well-scaled, intelligently blurred version of my cover as the background —blurred, in fact, such that it seemed like a nice bit of bokeh— and the option to listen to a preview of the track! I hadn’t uploaded it, so they must have matched it with a massive online collection they have access to, presumably Amazon’s.

The nice standalone web page.

It’s an example of Path’s devotion to a sort of aesthetic and functional holism, I think, that the entirety of their design and business resources are brought to bear on such a particular, non-core feature, whose scope spans your device’s stored music, the Path app itself, connected social networks, a web page, and another service providing matched music. Perhaps they wisely feel that for outstanding products, every included feature is core. In any event: it’s masterful.

Premises and Problems

Such extraordinary focus on quality is integral to Path’s premise, its raison d’être, and not in the sense that quality is important to, say, a luxury automaker. Path differentiates itself from the noisy, phony world of Facebook by asserting that within its confines, relationships have quality. They famously limit your number of connections (citing Dunbar’s number) and emphasize, in their marketing particularly, that only close friends and family belong.

Path insists in its tiniest details on a substantiality, an attentiveness, a thoughtfulness that reflects their beliefs about the how relationships should work. Thoughtful, substantive, attentive relationships are what make life worth living; thus the design is the instantiation of a hypothesis of how humans interact, share, experience the world. 

This hypothesis is oppositional; it exists in contrast to the hypothesis seemingly embodied by Facebook: all relationships are mere friendships and the more the better; reviled high school enemies are scarcely distinguishable from one’s spouse or best pal; and all activity ought to be completely public. Facebook’s underlying hypothesis bothers nearly everyone who uses the site, so competitors are perennially emboldened to devise a superior model.

But as I’ve failed, once again, to take to Path, I’ve wondered if it isn’t the case that their premise suffers from a familiar flaw (perhaps the flaw most common across the media of our time):

Path believes that it can make performative, broadcast behavior intimate.

That is: by limiting the number of connections, but shaping their nature, by imbuing the entirety of their product with a substantiality and a quality that emphasizes real human engagement, they can create an intimate network.

But there can be no such thing; real intimacy can never, ever be broadcast. It must be either one-to-one or one-off.

The Private Life is Dead

If I were to have a Path network solely composed, say, of Abby, Will, Elle, and Evan -all people to whom I consider myself incredibly close- what would my posts look like? I know Will thinks Frisky Dingo is hilarious and we like scatological humor; the same humor is repellent to Abby and particularly to Elle, while Evan and I are interested in concerns so dull to the rest that to speak of them would be a kind of abuse. Among my closest circle, then, broadcast would invariably be either bland or occasionally uninteresting -as on Facebook.

More to the point: when I want to share something with Abby or Will, part of what makes it special is that it is one-to-one; that is: it is not broadly performative, because it is an interaction without an audience. If I do send an email to a group of friends -say a photo that reminds me of a long-ago vacation we all took- it is one-off: the thread will be specialized to that topic and wherever our conversation takes us, like a table at a restaurant where old stories carry us into the night.

If one always ate at the same table -or worse, if one always conducted one’s social affairs before a mixture of acquaintances, no matter how close- it would either be generic or a kind of talk show! Facebook is a public space into which we are encouraged to pour our private selves, but at least it is clear what the benefits and drawbacks might be: we might learn of new music, new cultural artifacts, or new bits of history; we might find that old enemies have changed, or that acquaintances who seemed nice are berserk and weird. It’s not unlike a bar, then, and bars have their uses.

But does Path? It is a generic, centralized space for sharing with your “most intimate” friends and family as though they are an audience. It is beautiful, but it cannot overcome this basic utilitarian structure.

Intimacy and Inefficiency

Almost two years ago, I had occasion to tell my friends and family that I was moving to California. Some I called; some I emailed; but a few received a group email, and those that did were justifiably angry. They were not cross because the email was cheaply designed or thoughtlessly presented; they were not cross because they scanned the addressees and felt that they were mixed in with lower-tier friends. They were angry because they thought they deserved a one-to-one, one-off notice from me.

That would have been wildly inefficient, but part of caring is reflected in quixotic, romantic inefficiencies. Rather than gift cards, we give sweaters that sometimes fail to escape closets; rather than teleconferences, we fly cross-country; and rather than email our wedding invitations, we make use of ludicrously anachronistic methods in obedience not solely to tradition, but to this principle: efficiency is the enemy of intimacy.

Path is an incredibly easy way to efficiently share life’s moments with your closest friends and family in a centralized way, and for that reason it subverts its own premise, which always makes me sad; it’s beautiful work in service to a flawed idea. Any broadcast is inauthentic; a general audience kills intimacy; there is no such thing as a static social network of quality.