39. Have a Calling Card

If you take nothing else away from this post, take this: business cards need not be about business. You can have something with the form factor and general function of a business card, but broaden its scope well past business purposes. This is why I call the cards I carry around with me for this purpose "calling cards", or sometimes "contact cards" - business cards are if anything a newer version of a much older practice, that of the calling card or visiting card.

A calling card, or visiting card, started off in the 1600s as the successor to small handwritten notes that you might leave behind if you went to visit someone's house and who turned out not to be there. They were small decorative cards, with a simple image and some text on one side, and a blank reverse to write a short message on, and they spread from France and Italy to the rest of Europe as well as America in the early 1700s. Later on in the mid-1700s, with the normalization of calling cards and the advent of better color-printing technology, they became both more ornate and more often used in person, proceeding through the much plainer styles of the early 1800s to culminate in the late 1800s in small photographs. In parallel with this, the culture around calling cards elaborated, with extensive codes of etiquette governing their use, their exchange, and even the significance of how and whether you received a calling card in return. In the 1900s, they largely gave way to the modern business card, between changing professional and societal norms, the decline of the manor house and the culture of the idle rich, and an overall trimming way of the perceived extravagances of the past.

So... why should you personally have a calling card? I claim that calling cards are an immensely useful piece of social technology. They provide a helpful affordance to people that you encounter and want to meet again. They let people get back in contact with you, and in particular allow you to control what contact info people have access to. You can even use the trick that many email services tacitly allow, where the email server ignores everything in the local-part of the address - the part before the "@" - which follows a "+", so that name@site.com and name+comment@site.com both refer to the same email address.

But why have a specifically physical calling card, then, when you could just have some kind of electronic contact card instead - something like a site on linktree or carrd? Three major reasons stand out to me. First and most obviously, you might not always have internet access, cell reception, a charged phone or laptop, or some other necessary affordance; the person you want to keep in contact might not, either. Additionally, you get to show off a sense of style, of aesthetic sophistication; if you have graphic design skills, now's the time to put them to use. Finally, there's what I call "the serendipity of physical objects" to put to work in your favor - links can get lost, open tabs can get buried, and emails can be forgotten about, but a physical object whose whole purpose is to permit the opening of a line of contact to you has a weight to it that makes it harder to forget about, and its mere physical existence makes things possible like someone you don't even talk to finding it after it's been left behind, or someone you gave it to finding it while cleaning up, thinking of you, and contacting you out of the blue. That latter scenario has happened to me more than once, and brightens my day nearly every time it does.

Best of all, you need not make your calling card purely functional. You can add little blurbs about yourself, and provide something like a conversational menu that paints you in a good or interesting light. You can have interesting decorations, short puzzles, or even papercraft. You can use the reverse side as an entire second canvas, or leave it blank to allow taking notes, as in ages past. A calling card can be whatever you make of it - be daring, but informative and honest, too; present yourself as you want to be seen.

Pictured below: the obverse of the first and current iteration of my calling card, which I'll have to get around to updating.


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