In order to imagine where the future is headed, let’s first lay out the three main steps of connection building to examine how the physical and digital worlds fare at each:

Discovery : you find someone you want to meet, or that person finds you

Connection : some initial contact is established

Connection strengthening : further interactions strengthen the relationship

In the physical world, discovery is the hardest part. Think about your high school or neighborhood — how many people truly vibe with the same things as you? When you walk into a networking event or conference, think about how hard it is to know who within that event is the most relevant to you. Once that discovery happens, physical networks are pretty good.

Digital networks are essentially the reverse — they excel at discovery. TikTok is the extreme example of this, where you can open up the app with zero information and within a few days it will have connected you with a few influencers you’ve never met and never thought you’d care about. Digital tools are ok at connections, and struggle with helping people build deep bonds.

Basically, digital-first networking and physical-first networking are mirrors of each other. If they were funnels, digital-first would be great at the top of the funnel, and bad at the rest, and physical-first would be the reverse. And since we’ve been optimizing physical-first connections for thousands of years, we can assume things aren’t going to change. So for digital-first networking to dramatically improve our lives, it has to get a lot better at facilitating connection and connection-strengthening.

Joey DeBruin • The digital flip